Reflections...

may be some of us will not be up to having anything to say. We might draw blanks. When I’ve blocked in the past, it hasn’t been so much a problem of not feeling like writing as of not really feeling like I had something worth saying…the reason that most writers don’t write is because they have nothing to say. I’m all too ready to agree that it applies to me, an unimaginative type if there ever was one. (Boise 45)

     This was the sentiment shared by quite a few of my students the first week of classes when I asked them to expound their development as a writer and how they imagined themselves appropriate the role of a writer. A lot of them believed, like I did too for most of my life, that writers are “a special breed.” They are people who wake up in the middle of the night because an idea strikes and they have to jot it down. But now we know: “Neither motivation nor imagination has any good reason to appear out of the blue.” I got a lot of gasps and sighs when I talked about the first paper, especially when I said that they had to writer about 3 to 4 pages. Also, as I had divided the assignment into different parts leading up to the final assignment, the students thought that it was a lot of ‘busywork,” and yes, I had students use this exact word/phrase. But because most of the preliminary assignments were low-stakes, free writing assignments, they did fairly good on them, and before they could realize, they had a good chunk of material for their final paper. In fact, I had the first peer review today, and most people had exceeded the minimum page limit and acknowledged how this was the easiest paper they had to write, because of all the prewriting that we did in class. I am a big believer of collecting ideas, taking “useful” notes (as I have learned from my past mistakes of taking more notes than I could possibly ever use or even glance at again) and consider outlines a breathing, living, constantly evolving body/process. I found a lot of useful things in this essay that I use in my own writing process and also incorporate in planning assignments for my class.

I keep wanting to hit the “like” button when I am reading (blame facebook for that!), and I liked the following a lot:

“I sometimes imagine that I alone could want to write and not want to write at once. Thank god, I’m not alone. Misery loves company” (Boise 76).

My reflections on Rogers’ reflections…

Rogers has used a very straightforward style (thankfully!) to discuss the extremely important and convoluted task of reflection, its utmost significance to teachers’ teaching practices and students’ learning abilities. I have been asked numerous times about my teaching philosophy (especially in interviews for teaching jobs), and I usually have a very well thought-out response ready to be blurted out before the interviewer has even finished with the question. But I often think about, or I “reflect” upon this idea of a teaching philosophy. I think reflection is an indispensable tool for teachers as it engages us with our students more than anything else. Every class, every student teaches us how we can make our efforts as teachers be the best in both theory and practice, and the fundamental thing that I have learnt over the last 3 years of teaching is that I have to adapt—adapt according to my experiences. I learn from every mistake I make and from every success that I get. I was particularly pleased with the mention of “curiosity,” because I have seen teachers, including me, complaining about how our students are not curious to know or to learn. I think we have to be curious to spark curiosity in our students—curious about the way they learn and engage, about what works in classes, what makes students grasp a concept or get excited about something, and our curiosity enables us to invent techniques that make us more successful in our endeavors as teachers. We should learn to think and learn from our thinking, because “once teachers learn to think, they can teach their students to do the same, for teachers teach best what they understand deeply from their own experience” (Rogers 864).

Excellent tools for teachers

In Chapter 2, Boice is delving even deeper into the idea of prewriting and planning, giving writers a less painful alternative to procrastinating and binge writing. I feel like the prewriting process is so important to English 1000 students, especially since many are used to waiting until the last minute and then pounding out their assignments in the middle of the night. For many of them, that’s probably how they got by in high school, unless their teachers regimented very strict prewriting activities like highly structured, Roman numeral outlines (which I hated doing while I was a high school student). I try to encouraging students to engage in the kind of research process that facilitates their creativity, allows them to collect and assimilate ideas, and cultivates their interest in the subject matter. This is key. I also try to emphasize the outline, not in a regimented way, but with the attitude of, “This benefits me because I’m very visual, and the outline allows me to ‘see’ where my paper is going.” I agree with Boice in that outlines help to “organize ideas into visible, coherent wholes,” allowing us to “see patterns” (49) where we didn’t see them before.

Do I think the outline is beneficial in all instances? I don’t know. I had a MFA professor who decried outlining fiction as a kind of blasphemy, and really, I think the helpfulness of an outline depends greatly on the kind of story you're writing. Plot and character oriented stories typically require tons of prewriting for me (I do sometimes draw characters and locations from my stories, so the thing about the two writers in Boice’s workshop who sketch-outlined their ideas really excited me). However, I tend not to outline lyric stories in which the action is more internal and circular; the story sort of “directs itself.” I do concede that I revise like crazy once I have a first draft down, and that most of my truly original ideas spring up during the second go-around or later.

The Rodgers piece we read was very informative and helpful, particularly the attitudes highlighted in Criterion #4: whole-heartedness, directness, open-mindedness, responsibility, and readiness. All beginning teachers should be well-versed in these qualities. Teaching has required the most flexibility of anything I’ve ever done – there’s a very delicate balance between instructing your students and being willing to learn and adapt in response to them (Just like any rhetorical situation! How clever that the “I-Thou-It” on pg. 859 corresponds perfectly to the rhetorical triangle.). I especially liked the comments about open-mindedness, that being open-minded doesn’t mean “blind acceptance of all ideas without intelligent critique”; rather, it is “a willingness to entertain different perspectives, coupled with an acceptance of the ‘possibility of error even in the beliefs that are dearest to us’” (861). This is an excellent sentiment for everybody to have, especially teachers, and we should take special care to communicate it to students.

Gettin' Down to Business

To start off, I felt like this second chapter of Boice had a lot of useful practical advice that I could employ in both my teaching as well as in my own studies. While I was reading his section of ten "Stepwise Exercises for Facilitating Imagination," I couldn't help but think about the long, arduous process of writing comps in just a few short years. Is it weird that these steps made me feel less nervous? I felt like they were all really applicable and smart ways to engage with the crazy amounts of reading that we will do. These steps also got me thinking about possible creative venues to "engage in a writerly conversation with yourself" (56), "readying yourself to join the conversation of your genre" (55), and "alternate prewriting with prose writing to avoid the danger of staying in prewriting too long." During my MFA, several PhD student friends decided to start blogs while they were studying for their comps and/or writing their dissertations. They posted reflective, engaging pieces after they read a book or article, and while I often didn't read these posts, I would sometimes scan them and notice that colleagues would post comments or ask questions that deepened the blogger's exploration of this reflection. I remember thinking I should keep this in mind for when I get to that stage of my own academic career. Likewise, I wonder if I could use blogging in my class to get students thinking about their readings (such as we're doing now!). I want to teach a composition class with a first unit that centers on poetry, and I think blogging about poems the students read could be a cool way to get them to think about them a little deeper. I feel like overall, blogging to engage in a dialogue with yourself and others is practical and useful, while also being very low-stake. It gets your thoughts out there in the public with low consequences if you don't have it exactly "right" just yet.

In the Rodgers piece, I loved the quote "education is a verb rather than a noun," defined by John Dewey (846). I think this concept fits in nicely with Unit I, since we are using an open-form and asking our students to take risks they wouldn't ordinarily take. I did my first day of conferences today, and I was pleased to see that several of my students concluded their papers with more of a question of what's to come versus summing everything up in a nice, neat little bow (which I always steer them away from). A lot of them recognized that their writing careers are just beginning, and they were self-aware enough to know that this journey was going to continue to develop and progress both positively and negatively throughout their college careers. I think it's great that we start out with an open-form assignment, because, after all, so much of our job as comp teachers is to "un-teach" all of those rules and regulations they learned in high school. Most of them, so far, seem definitely willing to break away.

Baby Steps to Imagination, Baby Steps to Reflective Thinking

Boice’s chapter on “Imagination” builds on the habitual discipline of daily writing established in chapter 1 in order to implement exercises for finding the ever-elusive writer’s imagination.  Toward the beginning of the chapter, Boice discusses how “imagination leads to simplification including greater clarity” (49). I noted when I read this section that having a set method for recording notes that includes limiting oneself to a certain number of words and practicing what Boice calls “list-and-gist” strategy could be very helpful as it helps writers simplify toward clarity. I often find myself recording long lists of quotes from sources either because I am looking for thesis statements and themes and do not want to take the time to read the source first and then revisit it or because I get overly excited about the “quotable” possibilities of a text. Thus, I was intrigued when Boice declares, “As writers practice noticing, organizing, and associating ideas, imagination becomes more controllable” (49). When Boice gets to the point in his chapter where he discusses the participant’s reactions and apprehensions about his detailed system of drafting notes, reviewing and revising them, and finally filing them, one of his participants admits to taking too many notes in the past: “I took reams of notes, most of it useless” (60). Using Boice’s suggested method, this same writer felt he was able to gain focus and achieve depth in his ideas.

In my master’s program, I had two friends who both had established strategies for researching and note taking that they used for every single text they encountered. Both create brief abstracts for themselves on the source, which essentially contain the details Boice encourages writers to include. They then use an electronic and/or paper filing system to organize these sources, making sure that the keywords for the source were at the top of the page. This allows them to quickly scan what they had previously read and remember where certain ideas could be found. When their “list-and-gist” was not in-depth enough for a project, they would simply return to the source and make additional notes. In talking to them, however, it seemed that their abstracts were often adequate, freeing them from being tied to long quotations from these outside sources in their own writing. 

Such anecdotes turn my attention toward the next unit in my English 1000 classes. The version of the exploratory essay that I am having my students do involves formulating a question and then completing an annotated bibliography with sources that somehow address that question. The informative nature of the annotated bibliography is then paired with a brief reflection on how their sources have influenced their initial question: what direction can they see a paper on this topic going as a result of these sources? How have their thoughts changed over the course of their research? With all the technicalities of conducting research (I can’t even find books in the Ellis library – how am I going to expect them to?), I am worried that students will relegate the exploration and reflection of their question and process to the last minute. I am also concerned that attempting to teach them healthy research methods at this point will be overwhelming. I remember being forced to try the notecard method for a research paper in high school and disliking the tediousness of writing out citations and extremely abbreviated notes on 3x5 cards. How can I give my students tools for developing their own methodologies while encouraging them to try ones that have worked for me and other writers in the past? Ultimately, I am wondering how I can emphasize prewriting in my version of the exploratory essay by essentially casting the entire essay as a “prewrite” for the argument they will formulate in their next formal writing assignment. I might even consider introducing a few of Boice’s “rules” – without using the “r” word. Rule#6 “The most fluent, efficient, comfortable, and imaginative writers spend as much time at prewriting as at prose writing” (53), could be a great place to start.

This also leads me into Carol Rodgers’ article “Defining Reflection: Another Look at John Dewey and Reflective Thinking.” John Dewey’s educational philosophy obviously permeates the modern American school system, but I have had very limited exposure to the pedagogical theory of Dewey himself. Therefore, I was surprised to learn that Dewey placed such a strong emphasis on reflection, especially since I consciously engaged in very little school-related “reflective writing” in my secondary and post-secondary education. As a result, I particularly related to Rodger’s noting that “without a clear picture of what reflection looks like, it is difficult to talk about...practitioners find themselves using terms that are common but hold different meanings or are different but have overlapping meanings” (843). I fear I was guilty of using multiple terms with slightly different meanings last week when describing reflection to my students.

Yet, what surprises me most about Rodger’s analysis is the systematic criteria that Dewey establishes for reflection. Most of my English 1000 students seem relatively excited about our first formal writing assignment and are more or less looking forward to the chance to create a narrative that reflects who they are as writers. However, I have a few students who have been very resistant to the idea of reflection or really any type of open form writing. Letting these students know that “Reflection is a systematic, rigorous, disciplined way of thinking, with its roots in scientific inquiry,” could be a helpful way to engage students who think in more scientific or mathematical ways. This criteria is of course balanced by the rest: “Reflection needs to happen in community, in interaction with others,” and “Reflection requires attitudes that value the personal and intellectual growth of oneself and of others” (845). I realize that I was wrong in seeing reflection as an individual activity that could border on narcissism with the wrong ends in mind; a reorientation toward community helps promote the type of progress Dewey supports. I also find it fascinating that reflection, in Dewey’s analysis, is a “means to essentially moral ends,” which again leads us away from the idea that reflection involves spending endless hours considering ourselves as the center of the universe and instead points us to the type of moral “action” that will benefit the community. This also points to the fact that “reflection is not an end in itself but a tool or vehicle used in the transformation of raw experience…”(863). For me, the notion of reflection as a tool is a large incentive to begin attempting this type of writing as I try teaching for the first time.

Becoming Geniuses the Hard Way

In this second chapter, Boice talks about the misconception that "I shouldn't have to struggle if I'm truly creative and smart" (52).  Going back to my previous post about the first chapter, I really feel this is where my students (and I personally) get trapped in the I-hate-writing-sneaky-hate-spiral.  One block or pause in momentum follows another, and it seems like my true goal is to fill a page rather than to make a point.  

I really liked Boice's advice about "avoiding premature closure" (48).  In conferences the most common thing I was asked about the first paper was about what it should look like.  I told them not to worry about form too much; to just write it as they thought it should be written.  I told them that their peer review sessions would be a time (hopefully) for their classmates to provide them with feedback that would help form their papers into more polished second drafts.  My classes are going to do the peer workshops tomorrow, so I can't say as of yet whether this will happen or not, but in my past classes my students said this process made them feel much more comfortable (and dare I say excited?) about starting the first draft.  I think maybe this is sort of what Boice is suggesting; that trying to limit yourself too much from the beginning is damaging to the creative process.  That is sort of what I told my students.  I said that I didn't want to give them a formula because I didn't think there was one.  Some of them were kind of freaked out by that at first, but once I explained the peer review process (or what I hope it will be) they seemed to more open to the idea.  I guess I'll see how it goes tomorrow....

Story Time with Boice, Rodgers and Me

I will open with an admission: I am a fan of prewriting activities and think they are crucial in order to generate a imaginative paper. In that same vein, I will begin with a story. Enjoy...

Once upon a time there was a young student who went to study at a pretty old university across the pond. While there he participated in a strange academic ritual called the tutorial system. In this system he was often given a rather open ended question and was told to, in a week or fortnights time, arrive at an answer in a written form (usually around a dozen pages in length or so). The student would then be asked to read that paper aloud in front of his tutor over the course of an hour or so, wherein the tutor would comment and question the student on what he had written. This, as you can imagine, was terrifying. Coming from an American system filled with staunch page limits and thesis driven arguments, this question driven system at first felt overwhelming. How could he come up with answers to questions he could barely understand in the first place? How would he even start to find the resources needed to answer these open-ended questions? At first he tried to rush towards the answer, utilizing only the primary source (the only source that was given to him), but quickly he found that this alone was insufficient. Trying to rush to an argument failed to create any answers that were strong enough to be read to these dons. Despite how much time was spent trying to write a prose response, nothing that was generated seem to be of worth.

So, it was with great reluctance that the student began to rework his prewriting process. Instead of rushing strait into writing, he decided to instead spend up to half of his time (which was still only a few days as he had a week to write each paper) simply reading and questioning what he read. With the keys to one of the oldest and largest libraries in the world, he realized anything that had been written about the question he was given was at his disposal, all he had to do was find it and read it. He soon discovered that the act of reading was not enough though and he began to take notes. But even this became overwhelming. With the amount of notes being taken each day growing ever larger, he realized the importance of the simple act of taking time out of each session to organize his notes into some sort of easily discernible structure. As he wrote new responses week after week in the basement of a rotunda older than the country of his birth, he found his prewriting habits growing ever more nuanced, and as they grew so did his confidence in writing each paper. The student learned a tremendous amount that year about himself and about what it meant to be a writer, and in the midst of that self-discovery he learned quite a bit about the importance of prewriting.

Wow, I tell my students to never right the “moral” of the story in a narrative, but here I am breaking my own rule. So it goes I guess (this hardly constitutes a well-written narrative anyway).

I digress...

Back to the importance of prewriting in promoting imaginative writing, I will say that I find prewriting far more important in my academic writing than I do in my creative writing. In academic writing prewriting is simply indispensable, but in creative writing I believe it is only useful to an extent. At a certain point I believe the writer must allow his story to be shaped by his or her characters. If the writer is unable to feel the push and pull of the characters’ will on the narrative or poem, then I simply believe the end result will be worse for it. An overabundance of prewriting can, in my experience, get in the way of those character driven moments,, and I find those moments to be the most interesting moments of all in narrative based writing (be it fiction or creative non-fiction). But, that being said, I have written far fewer creative pieces than academic ones (although I believe academic writing can and should be highly creative as well), and I believe that prewriting and academic writing is inherently linked. I actually found Boice’s second chapter to be pretty spot on, and while he does seem a bit wordy for relatively simple concepts, I did appreciate the content. I really liked the idea about two-column note-taking, a technique I utilized when I was younger but since discarded. I think I might try to have my students employ that technique when we begin diving into our reader here soon.

When I looked at Carol Rodgers article, I was struck by the impressive disection of what it means to be reflective. I am encouraged by the reading to spend more time with my students (and myself) reflecting on the significance of what we are doing in class in order to “make meanings.” I think this Friday, the last class period before we turn in the first paper, I want to take some time to have my students reflect on what we are doing in class and draw some connections between what we have experienced thus far in class and where we are going. I think I will assign chapter 1 from the book for Friday in order to help facilitate that discussion, looking at how the literacy narrative pushes us towards a more open ended approach to writing, even while breaking us away from more common forms like the dreaded five-paragraph essay. I also like the ideas presented about the importance of reflecting in comunity. Coming out of the second section that stressed a more scientific approach to reflection (which I am a little resistant too), I like that Rodgers discusses the more organic role that peers have in promoting reflection. I just performed an activity with my students where they were put into groups and told to read aloud their papers to each other. This activity promotes community in the classroom by asking them to share stories with one another and then give thoughtful comments about what they heard. I think the sessions went extremely well and I was encouraged by what I saw. Taking time to create activities like that are extremely beneficial, and I appreciated that Rodgers raised that point.

Boice-Imagination/Rodgers-Reflection

Like with the last chapter, Boice suggests that the aspects that make up good writing (in this case, the “imagination” of writing) come from practicing daily habits.

Imagination is a tricky word. It brings to mind images (ha!) of a certain playfulness in writing. However, the ways he offers up to bring imagination in one's own writing sound dreary and, well, like work. “It turns out that imagination requires little more than regular habits of collecting writable ideas, of taking stimulating but practical notes, of filing and rearranging ideas until they suggest outlines and plans, of elaborating outlines with approximations of how we will express ideas and transitions of prose” and so on... I do understand what he's getting at. Maybe I'm getting hung up on the terminology of the word (instead of imagination ideas would be better? No?) What Boice seems to be saying is similar to what he talked about in the previous chapter about writing not in these hypomaniacal binges but through daily habitual sessions. I sort of understand that, but I do think that the type of writing makes a significant difference in imagination coming into play. With creative writing, I'm not sure if the day-to-day practice would always work, nor would the creating of outlines or the note-taking. Maybe the day-to-day habit of actually sitting in the chair trying to write would, but again, the writing process is different for everyone, and I feel like the type of writing too makes a difference. Maybe with less creative writing these exercises would be useful (on second thought, of course they're useful! How could note-taking and outlining NOT be useful?), but with creative work I think the rules get a little more fuzzy in regard to process.

The Rodgers reflection essay really hit home to me. I feel like I'm failing (every single day I feel like I'm failing) but it's important for me as a teacher to reflect on the things I'm doing and try and see what (if anything) I'm doing right, but also what I'm doing wrong and more importantly, what can I do differently next time to make it better? Nathan offered me the idea (which the article again reminded me of) of having the students do anonymous reflective essays at the end of the first paper which I think I'm going to do. I'm going to ask them questions about their process writing the assignment as well as problems they felt they had, what parts of the assignment they felt I made unclear, and what things I did in preparation for the assignment helped or hindered them...

I do agree with Rodgers when he says that it is “the meaning that one perceives in and then constructs from an experience that gives that experience value” (7). It is a concept that I am trying to get my students to understand when writing about their own life experiences. It's not the experience itself that is important, but what they learned from the experience and how it influenced them.

I do also take heart in the quote from Robert Kegan when he says that “no teacher outgrows the need for others' perspectives, experience and support---not if they are interested in being what Dewey calls life-long students of teaching” (16). We are always learning and as such, it's okay if mistakes are made (I need to keep reminding myself of this) because it's not the mistake that matters but what I can learn from it that matters.