Reading and responding to student writing: A heuristic for reflective practice

Composition Studies, Spring 2002 by Straub, Richard E

In "Composition Theory in the Eighties: Axiological Consensus and Paradigmatic Diversity," Richard Fulkerson laments the wide spread fragmentation and confusion in contemporary composition theory. He is particularly troubled by the ways we have come to tangle our talk about the goals of teaching writing-what he calls our different "philosophies" or "axiologies"-and the various means we have devised to achieve them. By 1990, he claims, compositionists had come to some consensus about their commitment to a rhetorical emphasis in writing instruction. At the same time, however, he sees "a growing complexity and conflict over means of reaching it" (410). The field, Fulkerson suggests, is in a knot, the means and ends of composition caught in a giant snarl.

I believe, with Fulkerson, that compositionists have come to some general agreement about the importance of audience and, more broadly, to appreciate the perspectives afforded by a social view of writing. I agree that there is a deep confusion about means and ends in the teaching of writing, and I suspect the problem has gotten worse, not better, in the past ten years, as we have expanded the range of discourses we study, learned more about the ways that context and community bear on reading and writing, gotten more interested in looking at students individually, at work in particular settings, and (regrettably) given less and less attention in our scholarship to questions of classroom practice. But I'm not so sure that we have come to a consensus about the goals of writing instruction or about the nature of good writing. Having spent some time in the 1980s sorting through the evaluative criteria espoused by the teachers in William Coles and James Vopat's What Makes Writing Good? for a dissertation and then studying the responding practices of recognized teachers for Twelve Readers Reading in the 1990s, I have come to see a great diversity both in our goals for teaching and in our views toward what makes writing good. In fact, I think a good bit of confusion has been caused by a general failure to define our values for writing and make them consistent with our goals, theories, and classroom practice.

In this essay I would like to help teachers clarify their values for student writing, get their assumptions and classroom methods in dialogue with their goals, and then suggest a way to deal with this disciplinary confusion. To do so, I will:

1 construct a protocol of a teacher reading and responding to a student essay, to show the complexity we run into as teacher-- readers and all the things we have to sort through, focus on, and consider when we read and respond to student writing;

2 provide a map of the various concerns we can take up in our reading, and use it to examine reading and response in relation to the larger contexts of the writing class;

3 create and model a heuristic for us to reflect on our own reading and responding practices in light of our philosophy, assumptions, and practice.

Whereas Fulkerson takes up the problem of ends and means at the disciplinary level, as a problem for composition scholars, I am concerned first of all with the problem such theoretical conflicts have practically for individual teachers and actual classroom practice. Instead of looking to theory to address the problem from top down, I will approach the problem from bottom up by calling on teachers to work through the problem in terms of their own commitments and problems, with the help of theory.

A PROTOCOL OF TEACHER RESPONSE: THE SCENARIO

Imagine the following situation. It's halfway through a first-year writing course at a large state university, in a writing program staffed mainly with graduate teaching assistants who teach two courses a semester. Writing program administrators favor a process-based expressivist approach to teaching writing, employing no standard textbook and requiring students to write six essays, most of which are based on personal experience, most of them to be taken through a series of drafts and revisions. Teachers are encouraged to privilege the writer's individual voice, be liberal about the use of narrative, value details and examples from the student's personal experience, and encourage experimentation with organization and style. They are urged to emphasize the development of the writer over the quality of the written product and to respect the needs of the individual student.

The teacher is an experienced teaching assistant who has taken the required training course for new teachers and, to satisfy an emerging interest in teaching, one other course in composition theory. She has found herself invigorated by the expressivist emphasis on personal voice and writing that is close to the self, and she has gone into her teaching with genuine excitement. At the same time, she has developed a real commitment to the importance of writing for readers. She sees herself as a hands-off teacher intent on making the classroom student-centered. A fairly successful student with a history of doing well in her own writing, she does not underestimate the importance of clarity and focus, an authoritative stance, and tight organization in academic writing. In fact, she wonders if more attention shouldn't be given to such concerns, as well as to grammar and mechanics, in first-year composition. Over the semester, she has tried, with less success than she had hoped for, to spend no more than 15-20 minutes reading and commenting on each student paper. Nevertheless, she plans on giving this batch of papers slightly fuller comments than previous papers because she sees it as a crucial point in the class, a culmination of their work to this point.