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Pedagogy Behind CollegeWriting.info

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            This brief essay situates the pedagogy of this Web textbook, CollegeWriting.info.   All "Theory for Instructors" pages such as this are introductory essays for instructors learning to apply theory to their teaching.  

            As the "Welcome!" message on the home page of CollegeWriting.info says, this Web textbook is "a genre- and community-oriented textbook with an emphasis on learning-centered, writing-intensive instruction."  This means that CollegeWriting.info teaches students to learn specific types of writing for specific situations.  "Specific situations" means not only individual assignments, but also the entire community in which a writer may find himself or herself: e.g., a small business, a history department, a large technical firm, a government service organization, etc.   

          This Web site is positioned in agreement with the argument of Gerald Graff, a long-respected theoretician in English studies, that students need to be taught strategies of writing--what he calls "templates."  There are, he argues, templates as simple as those used for starting a type of writing (I think of the creative writing assist "Once upon a time, ___ had a problem with ___") and as complex as developing a sophisticated argument.  According to Graff, "There is always the risk that teachers will use such templates in a mechanical and sterile way"; however, if students are not provided with them, they "desperately [try] to guess" and produce a "kind of robotic response" (172).  Graff says those who would argue that teaching templates stifles creativity are wrong and, in fact, using templates can free students to pursue their creativity more fully.  Such templates are not limited merely to the rhetorical modes but rather include a much wider and more diverse panoply of what might more appropriately be called--in their proper usage--heuristic strategies.  The format of a proposal, the urgent voice of an editorial, close reading, methods of research, strategies of revising and editing--all are heuristic strategies: methods that can be used as tools to increase learning, develop knowledge, and improve retention of both content and the strategies themselves.

            In terms of English and interaction with literature, this Web site positions itself at least in part with Kurt Spellmeyer, another well-respected leader in English studies, who argues that "the avant-garde postmodern humanities in taking the so-called semiotic turn--its turn away from experience to the somber pleasures of 'textuality'--may have unknowingly revealed ourselves to be Lionel Trilling's most obedient disciplines" (113).  Trilling believed that those in academe need to remain aloof from popular culture.  According to Spellmeyer, a more appropriate attitude is that of Joel Spingarn, who argued for a "creative criticism" in which a "reader or spectator is able to relive the vision created by the artist" (86).  Similarly, this Web site assumes that the best way for students to learn to write is to place themselves in the lives of those who accomplish the kind of writing they must learn.  This means emulation--teaching patterns, audiences, purposes, etc.  It also means helping beginning and intermediate writers to experience how academic and professional writers in specific professions and/or situations use creative and critical thinking to develop content.  

            As Katherine K. Gottschalk argues in the ADE [Associated Departments of English] Bulletin, 

Writing...happens for specific purposes, for specific occasions an audiences, in specific genres determined by those rhetorical situations.  The application to student writing is evident: students daily encounter and must use widely differing genres, whether they are producing lab reports, research papers for history curses, or e-mail messages to discussion groups in one or several classes.  They must learn to write in the genre appropriate to each of many situations that they encounter in their courses.  Obviously, in-depth, ongoing experience in a situation will improve a student's ability to write.  Just as baseball players learn to play baseball through daily practice, exercises, coaching, and regular experience in games, students learn through immersion in the experience provided by a biology or history class; they learn how to become players in specific fields.  (50)

            As Gottschalk's comment about how a student must "learn to write in the genre appropriate to each of many situations" implies, writing also is developmental.  As Mike Rose, a national expert on developing students’ college skills, argues, what he calls the “gatekeeper courses”--introductory disciplinary courses--should be “taught explicitly and self-consciously as courses on how to think as a chemist or a psychologist or a literary critic,” and lower-division students should be given “instruction on how to use knowledge creatively” (191).   

            However, writing should not be limited to "gatekeeper" communities.  It is a continuing powerful tool for learning throughout one's education.  Lee Ann Carroll of Pepperdine University argues for more.  In her research project funded in part by the National Council of Teachers of English, she followed twenty students through four years of writing as undergraduates.  She found that after first-year composition,

it is clear that the next major transitions in their development as writers took place as they struggled to integrate the content knowledge, concepts, and research and writing conventions in . . . disciplines.  This is the “teachable moment. . . .”  We found that the research and writing courses that some of our study students took . . . , for example, in psychology and history, were quite effective in making explicit the often tacit expectations of the field and could be usefully instituted in other disciplines.  (124-5)

            And if developing writers are, indeed, like Gottschalk's "baseball players [who] learn to play baseball through daily practice," the teaching of writing should be learning centered.  This means that it should consist of  Gottschalk's "practice, exercises, coaching, and regular experience in games" that, as Rose says, help people learn the academic and professional game.  Such learning--often called active learning--is a powerful tool.  According to Daniel T. Willingham, an associate professor of cognitive psychology and neuroscience at the University of Virginia , "Cognitive science has shown that what ends up in a learner's memory is...what the learner thought about when he or she encountered the material (37).  According to Willingham, “There is little doubt that students remember material they generate themselves” (40).  

            One of the very best ways in which students can develop “material they generate themselves” is to use writing.  Janet Emig argues this point in a now famous composition-theory essay: “Writing serves learning uniquely because writing . . . possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies” (122).   According to Emig,  

Jerome Bruner . . . posits three major ways[:] (1) enactive—we learn “by doing”; (2) iconic—we learn “by depiction in an image”; and (3) representational or symbolic—we learn “by restatement in words.”  To overstate the matter, in enactive learning, the hand predominates; in iconic, the eye; and in symbolic, the brain. 
           What is striking about writing as a process is that, by its very nature, all three ways of dealing with actuality are simultaneously or almost simultaneously deployed.  . . . [W]riting through its inherent reinforcing cycle involving hand, eye, and brain marks a uniquely powerful multi-representational mode for learning.  (123) 

            CollegeWriting.info thus hopes to encourage all writing instructors and students of writing to look for the patterns of writing in different communities, and then to practice, practice, practice.  This Web textbook also provides several levels of learning so that it may prove useful to basic (developmental/beginning college) writers, first-year composition writers, and writers in other academic disciplines and professional fields from the first year of college through graduate school and beginning professional-writing assignments.  Good luck to you all!  

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Works Cited

Carroll, Lee Ann. Rehearsing New Roles—How College Students Develop as Writers. Carbondale: Southern University Press, 2002.

Emig, Janet. “Writing as a Mode of Learning.” College Composition and Communication (28.2, May 1977, 122-28). 

Graff, Gerald. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.

Spellmeyer, Kurt. Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century. Albany: SUNY P, 2003.

Gottschalk, Katherine K. "The Ecology of Response to Student Essays." ADE Bulletin Spring-Fall 2003: 49-56.

Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary. New York : Penguin, 1990. 

Willingham, Daniel T. "Students Remember . . . What They Think About." The American Educator Summer 2003: 37-41.

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