I was talking with one of the folks in the department office today, and somehow the conversation turned to the choices that I tended to make as Chair, which I attributed to the fact I have a “particular set of quirks.” She thought that I was going to say a particular set of skills (riffing on the instant classic from Taken). While that’s also true, and a very legitimate professional strategy, shaping one’s job to match one’s strengths, my choice of career (and whatever success I’ve managed to achieve) has come from a different direction. I’ve been able to carve out a living in a way that accounts for my peculiar assortment of personality and behavior traits. I’m very much a proceduralist, a systems thinker, a strong introvert, and a lifelong night owl, for instance.
The week before classes presents quite the challenge for someone like me in my position, with lots of social obligations, day-long events, and a flood of information. Which is fine, but it leaves me really exhausted. Today was our department’s fall teaching conference, an orientation session for our instructors that ran for a few hours, and required me to kick it off with something like a 15-20 keynote address that referenced this year’s conference theme. So I thought I’d share the talk here.
I’m a little anxious about doing so, because I really didn’t give myself enough time to write and revise it. My natural writing style tends towards the intricate, which often means that, for a talk, I need to thin out the connections and focus more on clear, simple claims. I was able to do some editing, but I really didn’t leave time for actual revision, so it only feels about 60-70% there to me. Also, as always happens, I found my position changing a bit as I wrote it - I write to change my own mind as much as I write for my audience. Finally, I didn’t really have the time I’d normally take to develop slides to my satisfaction. So I’m including the basic script, without the visuals (they contain too many shortcuts for me to feel comfortable using them publicly). Is that enough hedging and qualification for you? If so, here’s a lightly edited version of the speech I delivered this morning. The theme was “Studenting,” with a focus on how to prepare recent cohorts of students in our classes to succeed.
[Title slide: Worldbuilding in the Writing Classroom]
{welcome remarks]
[thanks to staff and event organizers]
What I’m going to do this morning is to talk to you a bit about the theme we’ve selected for Fall Conference this year. And I’d like to frame it for you in terms of worldbuilding.
[Slide2]
In one important sense, we all live in the same world, where even small decisions and actions can ripple across our interconnections to affect people we’ve never met or places we’ve never been. The popular term for this is the butterfly effect, which you might remember from Jeff Goldblum’s character in the movie Jurassic Park.
In the thirty years since that movie, you could argue that we’ve done a great deal to shrink the world, to make our interconnection more explicit. Moving from mass media to the internet to social media and streaming, tech companies invited us to connect with each other to such a degree that the “world at our fingertips” often feels like one vast simultaneity.
It turns out, though, that the world is still a pretty big place, so those same corporations gave us tools to carve our own worlds out of the mess. They called it personalization, and pretty soon they set up algorithms to make the firehose more manageable for us. Rather than bringing us closer together, though, these platforms encouraged us to withdraw into our own bubbles, more attractive to us because we believed that we’d built them ourselves. We began to retreat into our own customized worlds.
This isn’t just a story about technology, though. The pandemic required us to pull back from the physical world and hide out in our homes. Our political systems have been overrun by tribalism and polarization. Our communities have been eroded by years and years of neoliberal deregulation, pushing us further online into worlds that resembled each others less and less. Jonathan Haidt describes our students, the ones who have come of age in this world, as the anxious generation.
[Slide3]
It’s a lot, I know. A LOT A LOT. The good news is that we’re not asking you to solve these problems in Writing 105. At the same time, though, our courses, and our students in particular, are not immune from the effects of these forces. Last spring, in an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Emily Isaacs explained that
a lot of students are coming to campus unfamiliar with skills, habits, and behaviors that are necessary to succeed at college-level work — both basic things like the importance of meeting deadlines, paying attention, and being respectful in the classroom and more complicated skills like knowing how to annotate readings (to retain meaning) and cope with time-management problems.
To put it in simpler terms, our students are coming to us from different worlds. That’s always been the case to a certain degree, but for lots of reasons, the college writing classroom is perhaps more alien to them now than it’s ever been. Despite the best efforts of their teachers before us, THIS WORLD will be a mystery to many of them.
[Slide4]
Almost 50 years ago now, Michael Halloran wrote an essay for College English, called “On the End of Rhetoric, Classical and Modern.” In that piece, he explained that one of the problems with adapting classical rhetoric to our contemporary circumstances was that the work of thinkers like Aristotle and Cicero rested on certain assumptions about knowledge and the world. Much of classical rhetoric presumed shared values and common culture, where speakers or writers were credible to the degree that they embodied those values in their arguments.
For Halloran, the turn to modern rhetoric begins with the acknowledgement that we live in a time of fragmentation and isolation. The role of rhetoric isn’t to confirm our pre-existing biases, nor to speak only to those with whom we already agree, but rather to bridge the gaps among the worlds that we’ve all built for ourselves.
Halloran writes that, faced with these gaps, “ethos is the measure of one’s willingness to risk one’s self and world by a rigorous and open articulation of them in the presence of the other.”
I love that definition of ethos. I read Halloran’s article in graduate school, and it’s stuck with me for almost 30 years now on the basis of that line alone. It sets a pretty high standard for what happens in our classrooms. But I think we can all agree that the best courses change not only the lives and minds of our students, but our own as well.
This is not easy to accomplish. At the same time that we ask our students to risk themselves and their worlds, we must also meet them partway and engage in the articulation that Halloran describes. That can mean being explicit about our values and our expectations, some of which I think Isaacs gets at in her essay. But I want to push this a little bit further.
[Slide5]
One of my favorite game designers is a guy named Ben Robbins. He designs what I think of as invention games, usually intended for 3 or 4 people, and they depend heavily on collaboration and storytelling. His most recent is called IN THIS WORLD, and as the title suggests, it’s a world building game. I don’t want to get into too much detail, but the game itself is actually pretty simple. A group of players chooses a topic, brainstorms a set of elements associated with that topic, and then creates a list of generally accepted statements about those elements. From those statements, the players then choose some that will remain true and others that won’t. It’s a game about inventing alternate worlds, where the things we take for granted in our own world are called into question. Play begins with the basic formula that “In our world, things are this way, while in this new world, something’s different.” And players take turns tracing out the implications of that shift, in a way that almost simulates the butterfly effect. IN THIS WORLD models how even small differences in our assumptions might create a completely alien experience.
For me, one of the most interesting parts of IN THIS WORLD is the extent to which it encourages players to really dig into those assumptions, the parts of the world that they take for granted, and to imagine what it would mean if those assumptions weren’t in fact the case. I think about this a lot in the context of teaching writing, because our students may find some of what we teach them to be counter-intuitive. How many of them simply assume, for example, that good writers are able to write a perfect essay in a single draft or a single session of writing? How many of them believe that research is what you do once you’ve already determined your own opinion, that the role of evidence is to confirm that belief? How many of us convince ourselves that we write best the day before a deadline, even if we break ourselves of that habit later on?
[Slide6]
I don’t want to suggest that it’s only our students who need to interrogate their assumptions. One of the final things that Bill Hart-Davidson published before he passed away last spring was a short essay posted to Medium, posing the question “Have We Ever Done A Good Job Teaching Writing?” With his characteristic generosity, Bill appreciated even the negative attention that AI tools like ChatGPT brought to college writing, because it gave him the opportunity to talk about genuine writing pedagogy. If in our world, students are tempted by the prospect of dumping a generic prompt into Grammarly, in THIS world, they would have the opportunity to engage in what Bill calls “deliberate writing practice.” And he focuses on four activities in particular:
Giving high quality feedback on others’ writing
Planning revision focused on higher order concerns
Criterion-referenced review (a.k.a. critical reading)
Reflective writing about all of the above, referencing specific learning goals related to writing
Bill spent much of his career doing research and building online tools to enable those activities, to building a world where writing instruction would take them as its focus. But he also understood that his world was still in-progress. He explained that, in our world, “teaching is not like medicine where we have a culture of evidence-based practice. Where we select interventions based on the evidence of which activities work the best...Writing is still taught more like the country doctor seeing patients...” This isn’t an easy thing to hear, that we may need to question our own assumptions. But as Halloran wrote, “To open one’s own world to others is to run the risk of discovering its inadequacy, and thus to be compelled to reconstruct it.”
As you listen to today’s speakers, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to run that risk, to interrogate your assumptions about teaching writing, and maybe even to rebuild the world of your classroom alongside not only the other teachers gathered here today, but the students you’ll be meeting next week and getting to know this semester.
Emily Isaacs suggests that “It’s Time to Start Teaching Your Students How to Be a Student,” but I hope you’ll take the opportunity today to also consider how being a student has changed and is changing, in THIS world. -fin
And that’s it. People seemed to like it well enough. I’m mostly just glad to be done. I haven’t had a lot of time to read this week, so it may be a few extra days in between this and my next post. But there’s always more to say, so I’ll catch you later.