I was extremely invested in my final presentation for 471, because this topic my group chose may be the issue in education I am most passionate about. I hardly needed to research for this project; most of my information came from my own experience as a child in a system of gifted education and the benefits and detriments of such programs that I observed here. This topic also happened to be exactly akin to the op-ed piece I published earlier this fall (I actually cited it as one of my sources - not exclusively though. I found lots of other sources as well!) My passion paid off - my professor was very impressed with my dedication to the project, particularly my thorough annotated bibliography and knowledgeable and relevant personal experience.
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For this studio journal, I brought in a writing prompt from a creative writing workshop I took in high school through 826 Valencia in San Francisco (attached below). This prompt engaged directly with the materiality of words; students received printouts of famous poems that had been cut into lines and later words and phrases, and had to rearrange the text to create new meaning as they saw fit. Later, they were able to exchange words between poems and add their own language to the mix by gluing poetry fragments to sheets of paper and writing their own words in between. I saw this prompt as multimodal due to the way it forced students to engage with language as a material object to rearrange and recreate before them, engaging their visual and spatial senses as well as their verbal/linguistic. I also think the initial constraints and gradual removal of these limitations forced them to grapple with words and language in a new way. This prompt addressed questions of access within traditional literary spheres by allowing students to reconceive language of classic poets as well as adding their own language to the mix. By reconceiving the language of an external source, students reshaped meaning to suit their own ideas as a writer and artist.
The main reaction I received from my colleagues on this prompt was questions of whether or not it qualified as multimodal (and whether or not this was a favorable aspect of the activity). I understood their indecision; I grappled with this question myself. My conclusion was that, although this prompt was still rooted in traditional ‘writing’ practices (alphabetic modalities), it qualified as multimodal because of the way it united disciplines within the domain of writing. I see multimodal practices as being fundamentally interdisciplinary, and most practices that unite ideas across disciplines can be seen to some extent as multimodal - multiple modes of thinking are employed in their production. Creative writing is often viewed as separate from traditional academic writing; thus, I see creative writing prompts as being a ‘soft’ sort of multimodality, a gentle way of incorporating multimodal practices into the writing classroom. As previously stated, I also feel that this particular prompt had aspects of materiality that also allowed it to qualify as multimodal. Though I know my colleagues may not entirely agree with this stance, that is the perspective I’ve adopted. If I were to revise this artifact, I think I could really explore the possibilities of words as physical and material. Perhaps another stage of the prompt could be gluing words from the poems to the sides of cube-shaped blocks or dice, and trying to form poems that way, or exploring different kinds of shape poetry to utilize the ability to move the cut-out words around on the page however the poet chose. My colleagues shared more traditionally multimodal artifacts. Brynn spoke about the final project in her ‘editing and publishing’ class, which involved crafting physical books compiled of submissions of student work. In class, we noted how this activity required students to become familiar with the ‘languages’ of editing, publishing, and marketing, making this prompt multilingual in a sense in addition to multimodal. I think this is an excellent exercise for a writing classroom because the sphere of editing and publishing is still directly related to the practice of writing, but requires students to consider ‘composition’ in a new way to turn those writings into something three-dimensional and tangible. This assignment adds another layer of modality to the practice of writing. Kylie presented an artifact related to geocomposition: research she and her classmates conducted at the Ballard Farmer’s Market about sustainability. This assignment prompted her to consider the social aspects of writing as she corresponded both in writing and in person with vendors at the market, allowing exploration of various modes of communication. It also forced her to consider her own positionality and her potential subjects of study and audience - who visited the Ballard Market, and what privilege or access allowed them to do so? How would these demographics play into her research and eventual evaluation? By physically visiting this space, Kylie was able to craft an argument about questions of access within environmental justice and sustainability practices. While this assignment was certainly multimodal and addressed physicality and space, I don’t know if I would entirely define it as writing, though it certainly had elements of written work. Rather, I would designate a project like this as ‘composition’ - requiring similar skills such as crafting and revision as conventional written work, but taking place outside of the sphere of words on a page. I think it is possible and even beneficial to teach some of the skills of traditional writing using composition projects like this, as long as the instructor is explicit and intentional in their conversations with students about the skills they are practicing and the ways these can be transferred to producing traditional written work. Studio Artifact: Writing prompt using found poetry
Studio Journal Four For our fourth studio journal entry, focused around critical theory, I presented an assignment I was given in high school. After reading Michael Ondaatje’s memoir Running in the Family, students had to write stories about their own families in three different formats: a poem, a prose poem, and a prose narrative. To me, this assignment connected to our course concepts surrounding how to present and teach writing concepts to students with a variety of backgrounds. Within a creative prompt, students are given space to explore their own stories in their own words and language traditions, without as many limitations based on perceived need for formal or Standard Written English that may exist with more academic assignments. Additionally, the requirement of three different formats of creative writing opens space for conversations surrounding different writing styles and techniques, and could be expanded to include discussions of multiple forms of English and the ways students feel these should be used in different spheres. My colleagues agreed that this assignment presented an excellent chance for students to explore their own styles and voices in writing. Judy referenced a similar assignment she’d encountered in which students write a Where I’m From poem, similarly using creative modalities to incorporate their own backgrounds and stories while still challenging themselves as writers. Judy also pointed out that allowing and encouraging students to write personal narratives can humanize written forms like poetry, which sometimes feel unattainable or inaccessible, too ‘high and mighty'. Assignments like these can allow students to take ownership of the art form. Carianne elaborated on how the three different forms of writing provide plenty of outlets for students to discover forms that felt comfortable and relatable for expressing their own experience, and also left room for them to be creative and challenge themselves as writers. If I were to revise this assignment, I think I would incorporate conversations around language explicitly. This could take the form of written student artist statements on their works, where students explain their intentions behind each piece and why they made stylistic choices that they did. This would help the teacher grading the assignments to minimize any personal bias, especially surrounding students’ grammatical characteristics, and open doors for further conversations about choices within written English. This addition to the assignment would also allow students to reflect on their processes, and ideally make them self-aware of stylistic choices within their works. My colleague Judy presented a prompt based around the graphic novel Persepolis. She described an assignment where students would craft a miniature autobiographical graphic novel addressing their own positions of power and privilege, just as the characters do in Persepolis. In addition to having many of the beneficial traits of creative writing that I listed in my assignment above, Judy felt that this assignment would promote self-reflection and self-awareness, which is often deemphasized in high school classrooms. I suggested she consider an addition to the prompt where students also consider the ways in which they might lack privilege to account for the fact that not all students may identify with being ‘on the top’ of society, and allow room for those students to share experiences of oppression as well. This assignment would address aspects of positionality and systems of power that play into critical theory both overtly through this process of self-reflection on privilege and more subtly through the flexibility of the creative devices used as the assignment’s framework. My colleague Carianne shared an assignment in which students would craft an Instagram post, captions, and comments from the perspective of a book character of their choice as a method to study character relationships, desires, and motivations. Carianne felt that choosing a medium such as social media that many students are comfortable with would remove some of the institutional barriers that may bar students from discourse within the world of academia. This could potentially help mediate dissonance between students’ ‘home’ and ‘school’ languages. It would also allow them to engage in the literary process of character analysis on a more familiar and personal level, again providing a feeling of accessibility within the academic sphere. I thought Carianne’s chosen artifact was also an excellent example of multimodal writing instruction, leading into our ensuing unit! Attached below is the assignment I completed in high school on which I based my artifact for this ethnography
I based my teaching ethnography on my work as a WITS intern in a fifth grade writing classroom. I was fairly happy with my product, especially when I received praise and helpful feedback on my rough draft. However, I received a 3.5 as my final grade. This wasn't a bad grade, per se, and I understood my instructor's feedback for improvement, but I still found myself disappointed with the score. This was a healthy reminder for my perfectionist self that I don't always have to be the very best in the class or get the top score in everything, especially in a 400s level course where many of the classmates I'm being compared to are upperclassmen and even graduate students immediately preparing to become teachers themselves. I should be proud of myself for my efforts and for doing the best that I could, and in many ways measuring up to classmates much further along in school than I am. I also have to remind myself that I chose to devote much of my time in the week leading up to this assignment on my Op-Ed rather than hyper-fixating on writing my essay as I usually would, and that sometimes there are things more important than schoolwork. Update: I resubmitted my ethnography addressing the specific concerns my professor had offered, and got my grade boosted to a 4.0. My professor's comment: "Much improved, Zoe. I don't know if it's just because you were responding to my particular feedback (which could mean tailoring it to an audience of one), or what, but the revised version-- particularly that thoughtful analysis at the end, was so nuanced and thoughtful. That Bruffee quote, and your reflection on it, couldn't have been more perfect. Nice work. I hope you are pleased with this draft."
My artifact for this activity was the Teaching Seattle lesson plans I generated last spring as part of my Seattle: Reading and Writing the City class. The file containing these lessons can be found in that tab. Here is the reflection I wrote for my studio journal: Studio Journal Entry Three
For this Studio Journal, I brought in a lesson plan I had written for a creative project last year in a class on Seattle literature. This lesson plan was designed as a week-long unit for a high school classroom, based on the book This is How It Always Is, by Seattle author Laurie Frankel. My intentions in crafting this lesson plan was to engage students in unique ways, different from a traditional English classroom. I included scavenger hunts, mapmaking exercises, and plenty of creative writing. (Important to note: I never actually taught these lessons, so my planning was entirely theoretical). To share with my classmates for this studio journal, I zeroed in on a couple of activities within my overall lesson plan. This novel, which centers around a transgender child and her family, deals heavily with questions of identity. In my lesson, I had students discuss issues of identity within the novel. I then had them look up the novel online, reading book reviews and responses from local bookstores and national newspapers and everywhere they could find in between. They then returned to the class and discussed the novel’s theme of identity again having processed these broader perspectives, particularly touching on why the novel might have come across as controversial. Though not explicitly a lesson plan for a writing classroom, I would like to argue that writing and reading are closely entwined enough under the banner of English/Language Arts that this artifact can be examined through the lens of writing theory. I felt that this artifact exemplified the social constructivist approach on many levels. Directly, students are discussing and interacting with one another within the classroom environment to formulate ideas about the text. Students are also interacting with conversations surrounding the text on a wider scale, exploring social views and drawing their own conclusions based on these. Their thoughts are externalized and internalized cyclically. One revision that my colleagues suggested that I was very fond of is a further opportunity for students to insert their voices into the wider conversation beyond the classroom. In addition to reading book reviews and articles and discussing them, my colleagues suggested that students have the chance to publish online their own review or editorial based on their research, conversations in class, and opinions. I loved this - not only would it incorporate writing (and thus social constructivism) more directly into the assignment, it also allowed students the opportunity to add their voices to the literary ‘discourse community’ and apply what they discussed and explored in the classroom in a ‘real-world’ sort of way. My colleagues also shared their social constructivist artifacts. Soo Yong shared a discussion board that was part of her English 386: Asian American Literature course. Within the discussion board, students discussed the presence of Asian Americans within the US, providing an image or short description about what they thought of when they heard the term ‘Asian American.’ They were also required to comment on and respond to other students’ contributions. This made her think about discourse communities and peoples’ variety of perspectives that they bring to such a conversation, plus acted as an example of a new discourse community formulated within the class. She discussed how knowledge formulates when a collective crafts a definition on a topic - a very social constructivist principle. Our group proposed that perhaps this artifact could have contained more methods to probe discussion further and generate more of a collective conversation rather than just individual responses to personal views. We also said that the class could revisit this discussion board at the end of the quarter to observe how views changed. Yining shared an activity from her writing class in high school, in which students would be asked to compose on command, with two students writing on the board while the rest wrote at their desks. The class would then come together and critique the board students’ writing. Yining explained the social perspective here, where all students gained a greater knowledge and understanding of conventions of writing through group discussion and examination of individual students’ work. Our group did point out some potentially problematic aspects of this activity, such as the potential for public humiliation and stress. We proposed that perhaps students should volunteer to compose on the board, perhaps making the exercise more ethical. We also said that students should discuss in small groups before switching to large class discussion, so there were more opportunities for individuals to share ideas. Finally, we felt that the board writers should be given the opportunity to refute objections given by the class and defend their work, promoting a more communicative dialogue surrounding the writing process. Studio Journal Entry Two For this second studio journal, I brought in an article from the Dartmouth Institute of Writing and Rhetoric, entitled “Teaching Writing as a Process.” This article outlined in extensive detail the steps to the conventional cognitive writing process, offering insight on process vs. product, invention, composing, and revision, as well as facilitating the writing process. To me, this article read almost as a guide for students who weren’t able to access a writing or tutoring center and needed such support remotely, or classroom instructors who needed guidance in promoting student writing, such was its level of detail. I found this particularly compelling because it seemed to reinforce the cognitive belief of writing as a process of the mind, something that can be taught through a detailed instruction manual rather than necessitating face-to-face interaction. The connection to cognitivism seemed clear to both me and my colleagues in unpacking this article - Linda Flower is even quoted in the introductory segment. This article clearly outlined the steps involved in the writing process, defining them as somewhat linear and sequential, outlining each of their importance in arriving at a complete piece. Though the content of the article deviated a bit from being purely cognitive (as I will address below), the outline and general structure appeared almost mechanical. This led my colleagues and I to question: if the writing process can be reduced to a formula, what is the purpose of teaching writing at all? This seemed a particularly pertinent statement about writing coming from such a renowned institution as Dartmouth. My colleagues each shared cognitive artifacts as well. Sarah shared a metacognitive writing prompt for a class of high school seniors in which students had to break down and analyze their own writing process by sorting through the ideas behind every sentence in their essays. Though a bit of an extreme example, this practice offers a way to keep various ‘steps’ of the cognitive process in conversation with each other, from composition to revision. It shows how the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of writing can connect to each other, as suggested in our readings. Soo Yong shared a resume outline, where applicants could enter answers into a prescribed format to reach a completed product. This to me seemed like an interdisciplinary approach to cognitivism, showing how the mechanical, formulaic mindset of creation can be applied to other disciplines. It also begs the question: who is inventing and defining this formula, this process that students must adhere to for success? I personally really appreciated how this clearly cognitive writing instrument paid reference and homage to other writing theories and practices. For instance, the article starts off the segment on inventing by stating: “Invention includes everything that a student does before beginning to compose a paper. Of course, students don't stop inventing when they've begun to compose. And they are composing even as they invent. But for the sake of this conversation, we'll let the categories stand.” I appreciated this acknowledgement of how the cognitive ‘process’ sometimes feels incomplete or inaccurate to experience. I feel like the cognitive process is a tool used for writing instruction, and like any tool, it has its uses and its shortcomings. The article also suggested lots of places where students and their teachers could employ more social strategies, such as question-and-answer, or draft exchanges either in person or online. I really liked how this article seemed to use cognitivism as an overarching format, then allowed space for scholars to employ practices from other writing theories and frameworks within the cognitive structure. This is the way I think I would use and teach cognitivism: as a structure that could offer some kind of scaffolding for writers to begin their process. My feelings are summed up nicely by a quote from the composing section of the article: “Why? Again, because readers expect it. Can this expectation be violated? Sure. But you need to craft the paragraph exceptionally well if you're going to violate your reader's expectations.” Cognitivism sets up an expectation, a framework for readers to start with. It can be broken down, karate-chopped to bits and then reformulated later, but the cognitive process provides the materials from which students can begin to build.
Here is a reflection I did in response to our first Studio Journal assignment, as well as the chapter it was based on. Studio Journal Entry One - October 3, 2019 For this studio activity, I shared a chapter from Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird, called “Shitty First Drafts.” I absolutely love this chapter. I first read this piece in my high school sophomore English class, and have studied it several times since in other writing classes. Lamott writes in a voice that does not come across ‘high-and-mighty,’ but casual, relatable. The presence of her voice is strong within the chapter, my favorite quote being: “Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life, or that God likes her, or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend, Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do)” (Lamott 22). There are several other segments I appreciate, both in association to our course material, and personally as writing advice, as I will explain. Primarily, I chose to share this segment in the hopes that my classmates would experience like I did the delightful, informative journey that is reading this chapter. “Shitty First Drafts” is the sort of read where you can walk away after both feeling that you’ve learned something, and with a smile on your face. I saw connections between a couple of the ideas from this chapter and our study of expressivist theory. This quote exemplifies the first instance: “The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later” (22-23). This demonstrates the expressivist idea that the best writing requires spontaneity, the act of putting pen to page and seeing what comes out of it. People write to discover. As Lamott writes, “There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing about…” (23). Expressivism proclaims that writers discover their meaning (and self-actualization) through writing, which to me is demonstrated here. The other expressivist idea I saw in the passage is towards the end. Lamott describes all the voices constantly in her head while writing, and her process to quiet them down (imagine them each as mice, trapped one by one in a soundproof jar). This description ties in to the expressivist view of society’s influence on writing as an act of liberation against society’s corrupting influence. In blocking out these imaginary voices, Lamott mimics the practice of individualising, looking inward, and distancing herself from society’s sway. During our discussion, my classmates too saw the expressionist view of spontaneity and non-conformity within this chapter, and agreed it was an excellent example of both. My classmates each shared different but equally applicable artifacts. Kaitlin shared a New York Times lesson plan called “Picturing the Past,” in which secondary students were instructed to bring photographs of their families into class to help spark inspiration for their writing. I felt that this exemplified the expressivist ideal of self-reflection, as students were inspired by their own previous experiences. Our group also discussed how this connected to the expressivist idea presented in Britton et al’s “Shaping at the Point of Utterance” of how speech should be a model for expressivist writing due to its spontaneity. Students discussed the photographs they brought in before writing about them, encouraging this spontaneity. Kylie shared a second artifact: an erasure writing prompt, where students took pages from old books and blacked out words to create new compositions. Our group felt this showed the expressionist ideas of discovery within writing. We did question whether drawing on a previously written text material would be objectionable to expressivists due to its connection to the larger society that expressivism scorns. We concluded, however, that the personal experience that a writer must draw on to generate original and ‘good’ writing by expressivist standards extends to experience with previously written texts such as the ones used in the prompt. Moving forward, I do not think I would make any significant revisions to the artifact I presented. Writing advice of the sort offered in this chapter is so subjective that it’s hard to suggest revisions, except perhaps on the grounds of objection to the views the writer has to offer. In this case, I agree strongly with the points that Lamott presents. Since first encountering this article, I have used her advice both in drafting my own writing, and in my everyday life (her mouse visualization can be an excellent meditation to help with falling asleep). Lamott’s chapter not only contains strategies I find quite useful in the practice and teaching of writing, it also contains reassurances of the worthwhile nature of attempting to write. I would be delighted to present it to students in a classroom one day.
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