browndogsblog

2008-07-25T10:55:00.000-07:00

So - last post was June 8, and it's now July 25. I'm averaging one every six weeks, which certainly beats my former record and therefore counts as a moral victory.

I'm currently sitting in Midway Airport waiting for my 2:20 flight to Detroit metro. I'm on my way home from a Higher Learning Commission Assessment Workshop. For the reader (since I'm sure I'm down to one, or maybe even into the negative numbers -- does writing a post mean that readers go away when one does it only once every six weeks?) unfamiliar with the HLC, they are the primary accrediting body for post-secondary institutions in about 1/3 of the country, from roughly Ohio to Colorado on the E-W axis. I've done a few gigs with them over the past couple of years. I like working with them because I have a lot to learn from them, which is very cool. They see assessment as a process that should focus on the improvement of student learning. They are all about encouraging good assessment -- what we in the WPA world have been calling discipline-based assessment that is used to improve teaching and learning. They have some very nifty resources to encourage this kind of work, and the creds -- one might even call it the power -- to have people pay attention to what they say. It's very interesting to hear how institutions really believe that assessment should engage people, should be used for improvement, can be fun and interesting, etc. when it comes from their accreditor (and not, say, from a faculty committee).

Doing these workshops are really interesting because I get to see elements of the academic work I don't encounter often. I worked with four community colleges in this session -- I do see community college people, but mostly writing instructors. These were people from across the spectrum - administrators, student affairs folks, instructors of technical things and trades, and so on. I also get to see people from for-profit institutions, which is a whole different ball of wax entirely. That's a wild world, one that I'm not sure how I feel about. Or to put it differently, one I have some strong feelings about, but I'm trying to distance myself from those feelings and hear about their experiences and challenges. It's another learning piece -- pretty interesting.

Biking/thinking

2008-06-10T13:33:00.000-07:00

It's FINALLY summer-like weather and that SO works for me. As the reader(s) know/s, I hate hate hate hate hate hate cold. It was in the 80s with loads of humidity for the past few days, which works for me - but boy, oh boy were the family members whiny. So today, after buckets of rain, it's like 70-something (77, according to my Apple dashboard [which, btw, I finally got set to the right city - for a while it kept showing forecasts for Detroit, Alabama. I would like to live in that temperature zone during the winter, let me tell you - vastly preferable]). Puffy clouds are floating across the sky, and it's alllll good. Now, if I could make good headway - and I think that I might be, actually - on the latest project, great. More on that in a moment.

First, though, the subject is BIKING. Thanks to Dave Morris at the A2 YMCA, I learned about a new-to-me web site, mapmyrun.com, where people post bike routes. New ideas! New possibilities! This a.m., Ben Caldwell (also of the A2 YMCA, at least for this a.m.'s spinning class) also suggested some great new routes on dirt roads north of here. Exciting! The Friday spin class is riding outside this week, which should be great (Apple dashboard says the low will be in the high 50s/low 60s - lovely!). Weather this weekend is also predicted to be fab, so that means... yes... biking! More biking! I'm doing a lot more dirt road this summer than trail, but that's okay -- I see more, which is great. I still love the trails, of course.

And then, there's thinking. I still have to redo the fall class, but that's on hold while I work on this chapter for the new book and some work for another article. Thanks to thinking with James Carey and the public journalism literature (a lot of which is pre 9-11 - interesting to hear about changes with that...), I've been mulling over some issues connected to reframing. I think they're leading to some good ideas, but WHAT A PAIN it is to slog through! Ah, writing. Still hard. That's it, though, isn't it?

It's BACK!

2008-06-05T12:37:00.000-07:00

Having not written a post in almost a year, the tens of readers may now have dipped into the single digits. (Do RSS feeds unfeed themselves? Could be!) Nonetheless, I finally feel like I'm into summer work mode, which means that I can spend a few moments updating my reader(s) -- and that might be a singular, me -- on the many issues of interest here on BrownDogsBlog.

So.

Issue #1: Eastern Michigan University. We have a president who will start July 1; that's good. Our college has a new dean, also starting July 1; also good. If you happen to be reading this blog and are considering enrolling in EMU for the fall, DO IT!!! It's a great place! And take English 120, for pete's sake, will you? As always, EMU (like all institutions) has challenges an opportunities -- a BIG one right now around admissions and advising.

Issue #2: The world of public policy and assessment. Whoo! It's been quite a year around that. There was a story in today's Inside Higher Ed about what one can only hope is Ed Department's last attempt to monkey with the accreditation process. Let's hope the story is accurate. Meanwhile, check out the editorial by Margaret Spellings linked in the IHE piece, which captures the problem with the Ed Department so beautifully (in a hideous, car wreck kind of way). The problem: for Spellings and her ilk, the purpose of ed is to help individuals develop their talents and abilities so that they can advocate for themselves in the (corporate capitalist) culture. Education isn't doing a good job teaching to this, so "investors" (taxpayers) are not receiving the "benefits of their investments" (employees who can magically do everything). The solution is to cultivate that individual growth. Of course, this is a very problematic way to frame education and completely elides any notion that education is a place to think through the problems with/purposes of a democratic culture. It's just not good.

On the up side, I think there's a lot of movement around creating alternative stories and working from positive frames, which is good. I can't point to anything specific (except my book, but that doesn't count), but I've heard of a lot. So yay to that.

Issue #3: The OMB (that's oft-mentioned book, for new reader[s]). It's done! Now I'm working on a new project (with friend and colleague Peggy O'N) that is taking me in some very interesting directions. In case reader(s) is/are interested, the new book is called Reframing Writing Assessment. Working on the "reframing" chapter, I think I've gotten to some cool new stuff about the ways we need to shape discussion and our personas as researchers within/around that shaping. In some ways, the literature on objectivity and public journalism is really useful/important here, so that's cool. More on this as it develops.

Issue #4: Biking. Doing a ton of it. Loving it. It's all I want to do. I'm going shortly.

Issue #5: Flowering trees. A great year for this. And today, finally, it's hot.

That's it! For now. More in less than a year.

The poster photo for not mixing substances and driving

2007-08-23T17:32:00.000-07:00

I'll get to the subject line in a second. First, though, this: my last post was on July 11. It's now like August 25 or so. Very patient, tens of readers. Nice waiting. It's been a little hectic, actually. I finally caught up on the administrative stuff (pretty much, kind of). This included working with *load* of fabulous people from the FYWP on restructuring our courses (visible in our revised wiki), I started an article on the dreadful ACT National Curriculum Survey, I did various other things. Then I got the comments back on the OMB, and I had to attend to those ... and go to the WPA conference, and do the day-to-day planning for ENGL 596 (which started last week), and go to Beaver Island, and, and, and, ... so, not that I'm complaining, but the end of the summer was INCREDIBLY busy.

But back to the subject at hand - the poster photo. Here is why you don't want to mix substances and driving:

In case you can't tell, that's a car. And it's stuck in that house, a house which is across the street from my house. Here's the deal: at 3am last Saturday morning, we heard a loud BANG! I thought it was thunder, but then I realized it wasn't raining. Looking out the window, I thought, "there's no driveway there." The fire trucks and cops arrived pretty shortly afterward, and the guy driving the car was eventually brought out by a cop (after he tried to deck that same cop). A closer examination of that self-same yard revealed that, in fact, the flowers were still standing up *behind* the car - in other words, it sailed over the lawn and into the house. Nice!

I'm pretty zombified at this point - I'm teaching all day, every day right now - so I won't even attempt to summarize all that's happened in the last month, much less where things stand at my current teaching institution right now. Suffice to say that the things we keep thinking of as the icing on the current situation cake just keep getting buried under more icing. The latest: our e-mail was out for SIX DAYS, from last Friday until this morning. Oy. I will say this: it's very fun and terrific to be back in the classroom with the knowledge that I'm not leaving in a week, as I did last year. Sabbatical was fun and I loved it; I also love this. So that's a GOOD thing!

Le Show and EMU + other news (plus a photo)

2007-07-11T06:41:00.001-07:00

This is the flower of a Century Plant, a kind of agave. I took this photo outside of Silver City, NM, where I am now. The flower grows from the plant (and the leaves are about 7 feet tall), and then the plant dies after the flower comes up. We saw a whole hillside of these plants as we were driving toward the Gila Cliff Dwellings. Super fabulous and cool.

It's good that I can enjoy moments like these in my life, because there are many other moments right now that are not quite so fabulous. Not bad, but ... mmmm... shall we say, lively. I've not written on this blog about EMU's recent forays with the Education Department (I've been thinking about them in other contexts, as the tens of readers know), but the administration has also had many interactions with them over the Cleary Amendment, which requires universities to notify faculty, staff, students, etc. when something occurs that poses a clear danger to the campus - say, a murder. I have made every effort to essentially take the moral high ground here, continue to do an excellent job, try to pretend it will be resolved (which I guess it will be), etc.

But then, this. Every week, I listen to Le Show, one of the many things that helps me keep my sanity given my proclivity toward, shall we say, long term depressing (in terms of policy) thinking. I especially enjoy segments like "Dick Cheney: Confidential." I heartily recommend this program to all of the tens of readers. Another of the regular segments of Le Show is The Apologies of the Week. Last week, Scott (the spousal unit, for the tens who don't know) and I were listening to Le Show on the way to pick up the young thing at camp. "Apologies" came on ... and one was from John Fallon, EMU's president, re: the current campus situation.
Sigh. I can run, but I clearly (or, should I say, Cleary, ha ha) can't hide.

But enough about that. We'll get through this. One of my friends/colleagues from EMU saw another colleague from EMU at the gym; this second colleague told the first that she's come up with a new slogan for EMU faculty: "We Didn't F*** Up." And it's true. EMU's faculty remains first rate, which is why it's ultimately still a good place to be, despite the current crapola. So there it is.

Meanwhile, for those of you keeping score re: the OMB, I got smart comments from reviewers. Goal is to have revisions done by the time I start teaching on August 20. I should start a countdown clock to that ... but won't.

And now, I'm off - with my mom, for today - to the WPA annual conference in Phoenix. Today's high, 111. It's a dry heat, though. It will be great to see friends and colleagues.

early-mid summer in A2

2007-06-24T03:28:00.000-07:00

I've started to write a post about my experiences at the U.S. Education Department regional hearing on the Spellings Commission report (lively, I suppose) and recent goings-on at EMU (not very uplifting), but I decided that both were too complicated to put here. Suffice to say that I'm learning a lot. I've been far, far busier than I imagined a summer-after-sabbatical would be, which is to say I'm working like a fiend, but it's all interesting.

But now, it's time to talk about something else: reasons why it's great to live in A2 in the summertime. The first reason is mountain biking. Thanks to my friend Maria, the most naturally gifted athlete I've ever seen, I have taken up mountain biking (which, given that there are no mountains, here, is more trail biking). There are many great courses around Ann Arbor and in Michigan, many of which are mapped out on the Michigan Mountain Bike Association web page. I bought my bike with money from doing the WAC and advanced WAC workshops with Ann Blakeslee, which I think is a pretty good tradeoff - I liked doing the workshops, I get a new bike. I have to say that I have never loved a piece of exercise equipment like I love this bike. It's a Trek 4300, 16" frame. Trek (and many other bike companies) are making women's specific design bikes now, so this bike has a shorter distance between the seat and the handlebars and a great seat. (The photo I've linked to doesn't include the pattern on the seat that mine has - sort of flames. I figure they make me go faster.) I can't quite say why mountain biking is so fab, but here are some reasons:
*It's very technical and requires a lot of concentration
*There's no traffic through the woods
*Cadence is WAY more important than resistance
*It's just basically awesomely fun

We're in the midst of a drought here in SE Michigan, which is such an unusual experience I can't begin to say, so the trails have been GREAT - hard packed and dry. Yesterday Scott (the spousal unit) and I went through this place called Olson Park, and it felt like the grass was actually cutting my legs a little. But no matter. Scott also did a header over his handlebars, but he's fine. Just one of the elements of mountain biking that makes it exciting, that little possibility of danger.

So - accessible mountain biking is one great thing about summer in A2, which is really the theme (such as it is) of this post. Another great thing is the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, which is going on now. Last night we went to see a group called Strange Fruit, Australian aerialists (?) who perform on poles. My friends/colleagues Steve Krause and Annette Wannamaker were also there (we didn't see the Krausemakers, but they saw us), but Steve took some video and put it on YouTube/his blog. Check it out. It was a BEAUTIFUL night, and it was super cool to see these people on top of poles swinging back and forth against the Rackham Grad School building (which is a lovely building) and the blue sky with high cirrus clouds, etc. Really lovely.

Number three great thing about Ann Arbor is its relative accessibility to Michigan's #1, no holds barred, absolutely best feature of all - Lake Michigan. This side of the lake, in case any of the tens of you are on the other (Illinois/Wisconsin) side, is SO much better - it's incredible. Like the ocean without the salt and the biting fish. (Of course, also no great snorkeling, but whatever.) Today will be our first summer visit - very tinily brief - to the lake. We're taking Nora to camp. Her camp (Crystalaire) is on Crystal Lake, which connects to Lake Michigan via the Crystal River, which goes into the Betsie Bay. In about a month, we'll go on our annual yearly vacation to Beaver Island, which is a fantastic place - much swimming, biking, sitting on the beach and reading books... lovely.

So - those are some things about summer and Michigan. It still makes it worth enduring the crummy November-March stretch, so that's good...

Flowers, cont.

2007-05-19T14:58:00.001-07:00

This a shrub called wygelia, though I'm not sure that's how it's spelled. (I could check, but hey - that would be wrong, right?)

This is a shrub, of course. It has LOADS of flowers, and they're quite vivid. (The colors aren't as vivid on the web.)

Finally, not a flower, but one of our gigantic hostas. I love these. The leaves are huge, as you tens of readers can see in the contrast between my (admitedly very, very small) hand and the leaf.

Lovely plants.

Eventually I'll get back to that ed stuff ... but these are such nice plants.

More flowering plants

2007-05-19T14:41:00.000-07:00

I neglected to mention that the reason my last entry was late was because the flowering trees pictured had actually bloomed a couple of weeks ago - I just didn't get them up. The flowers here, though, are from today - they're current flowers. I'm sure you tens of readers will appreciate that.
So: Here

and here:

are two horse chestnuts. They have different color flowers, as you can see. I took these from the car - pretty good, huh? They're on the east end of our street, Washington St., by the U of Michigan.

Here are some more flowering things from our yard.

I know this is kind of out of focus, but I wanted to show how the flowers are actually different colors. Some are more purple, some are more pink. Cool! Here's an in-focus, but not as close up, view.

This is a tree at our neighbor's house.
It's very cool. The leaves are sort of edged in pink, as below. I like that these very colorful trees grow here.

I have other pictures from our backyard, but for some reason blogger has pooped out on letting me put more photos in here - perhaps too many in this post. So will put those in another post, right away... because I'm sure people are DYING to see them.

Blooming trees of Ann Arbor - a very late post!

2007-05-17T16:33:00.000-07:00

It's FINALLY spring here in SE Michigan. (Yes, it was only the high 50s today ... but that's part of spring.) Anyway - one of the virtues of living here are the lovely blooming trees. Sure, there are blooming trees in other places - in MN, for example, we had flowering crabs, etc. But there seem to be more here than in MN, and certainly more than we had when I was growing up in New Mexico. So - I have taken pictures of a few of my favorite flowering crabapple trees, which I now offer to the tens of readers. I only wish I could include the lovely smell. May I say, too, that it was my *intent* to take pictures of the other lovely blooming trees; I just haven't gotten to it. Right now, for ex., the horse chestnuts are blooming. They have very cool flowers that extend straight up in the air from the branches, and lots of them. If you do an image search you can find photos, but it's not the same as seeing one from the ground.

The image up at the top here is of Vesper Street, which is just to the northwest of our house. The whole length of Vesper is planted with flowering crabs. How lovely is *that*?

This second photo, to the right, is on Edgewood, which to the south of us about 3/4 mile. It's at the top of Wurster Park in Ann Arbor, and Wurster Park is just down the street from Washtenaw Dairy, which is a VERY IMPORTANT PLACE because it is *the* place to go for ice cream. I am a very big fan of ice cream, as the tens of readers doubtless know. I will say here, for posterity, that when I die I would like everyone who comes to whatever event is held to observe my life to have ice cream. However, I diverge from the subject of flowering trees.

Here is the flowering crabapple tree in our backyard. The flowers on our tree are paler than the ones on the Edgewood tree, but they're still really pretty.

FYI, here is a picture of the back of our house. It's a little top-heavy, our house. It was cloudy the day I took this photo (the same day I took the one of our tree). But it's a very nice backyard, and a very nice house.

So - this is my post about the blooming trees. Next time, back to the less lovely, but very engaging, things I'm thinking about...

ACT recent survey/Barbara Cambridge's NCTE blog

2007-04-25T05:57:00.000-07:00

Barbara Cambridge has blogged about this year's ACT National Curriculum Survey. As with the previous report, this one indicates that college writing instructors say hs classes should focus more on grammar and punctuation. Who are these college instructors, I ask? As I said in a response to Barbara's post, I was a respondent for the previous ACT survey. I found the questions maddeningly narrow and underscored by a conception of writing/learning that bore virtually no resemblence to one shared among those in the field of composition/rhetoric. I wrote my objections to the survey on the document; I have no doubt but that they were discarded. The most recent report, like the previous one, also refers to ACT's various curriculum and placement instruments as products that can help hs teachers "provide" what college teachers are represented as desiring, too. It's yet another example of the testing/curriculum industry's self-referencing, profit making research. Follow those footnotes, too ... I have no doubt but that they refer to other studies conducted by ACT and aligned organizations.

The next time this survey comes out, I'm going to suggest that everyone who receives it stage an action against it - that's the only way I can think of to catch ACT's attention and let them know that this is not the way that many college writing instructors approach/envision writing instruction. Gargh...

The Eagle Has Landed

2007-04-23T07:57:00.000-07:00

Well, not maybe landed - and it's not an eagle - but I did get a draft of the OMB in the mail to the publisher on Friday. So that's something. It's only a draft (after the previous 1,000,000 drafts of each chapter, of course) and there will be revisions, but it's off. Now, I await the comments of reviewers. Hopefully they won't say, "What? What is this drivel?" And as I wait, there is oh, so much more to attend to... but I won't go into that here.

What I will go into, a bit, is praise for the intrepid Inside Higher Ed reporter who is keeping track of the Department of Ed's moves around accreditation, Doug Lederman. He's doing a great job writing this out very clearly, I think. If the tens of readers have not been keeping up with this discussion (which is a sort of under-the-radar thing, I think), check out Lederman's latest story. Higher ed can hold its breath and make all the threats it wants to (not that anyone is - more, I think, people just aren't paying attention), but something is going to happen. The key is for us - higher ed., I mean - to have a voice in what that something is.

But that work can be for another day. Because today, now that the OMB is in the mail, it will be time to devote yet more attention to some of the surprisingly reassuring minutae of WPA work, like putting the final touches on the fall term ENGL 120/121/225 schedule. Sure, it's like one of those little games with the numbers in the square where your job is to put them in numerical order... but there's something calming about that contained order-ness, especially in the midst of this kind of chaos. And then I'm going to turn to all the reading I haven't done this year - like Jeff Grabill's new book on electronic stuff and civic action, which I'm very excited about, and also a book called _Who Can Afford Critical Consciousness_ that looks interesting, and Sondra Perl's book about going to Austria (not new, but I still haven't read it). I am thinking about a restructuring of the course I always teach in fall, "Teaching Composition at the College Level," so that it reflects some very exciting thinking that a group of us have been doing around ENGL 121 (our research writing course, for you tens of readers who don't know EMU's writing curriculum like the back of your hands - which, if you don't, why don't you? Shouldn't EVERYONE? (hahahahahaha - joke there.) I also want to reread _Everyone Can Write_ again because I find it so lovely, as mentioned in a previous post. So - many things to read. The weather is FINALLY not apalling, so I might even be able to do some of this outside. How nice is *that*?

PS For you tens of readers waiting for the memo I mentioned in my last post, I decided not to post it. Enough to air my issues here; no need to stoke the fire.

A Visit with the Assessment Consultant, or Putting ?? Where Mouth Is

2007-04-15T08:56:00.000-07:00

In my re-emergence into the EMU scene from the world of sabbatical, I've recently had the interesting experience of serving on EMU's Retention Council. This is a group convened by the Enrollment Management division (they oversee admissions and advising) to work on retaining students. As part of the effort, EMU also has retained a retention consultant who has been doing some work with the university over the past year (apparently).

I learned about this consultant's work first hand when I was appointed to the Council (three weeks ago). Among the consultant's recommendations were items and questions directly affecting the First Year Writing Program (that's the program that I run, yes, formerly in conjunction with our much-missed colleague Heidi Estrem, soon in junction with our new colleague, John S. Dunn) that I had heard nothing about. The consultant is pushing reverting to using ACT scores for placement into 120 (a practice that we *finally* abandoned two years ago; a practice that is completely unethical and invalid because ACT/standardized test scores say nothing about students' writing abilities), and asking questions about the performance of students in English 120 that, shall we say, are not grounded in an understanding of assessment principles and practices from composition and rhetoric.

Needless to say, I am working with this consultant - and with the Retention Council - to reframe the questions being raised/concerns being articulated so that they do reflect what we know. I have sent several e-mails regarding placement to this person and have drafted a memo that, once my colleagues read it and let me know that it sounds okay (and/or I make the revisions they suggest), I will post to this very blog so that the tens of readers can get a sense of the situation.

This whole situation is pretty interesting on many levels. Some of them are institutional, and I won't go into those here for probably obvious reasons. But more broadly, this is a situation where someone who knows very little (and maybe even less than that) about writing instruction, research, placement, or assessment is coming in and asking pointed questions (that are really, if you ask me, only slightly disguised recommendations, and probably will soon be less than disguised recommendations) *about* writing instruction (etc.). I wonder: why might this person believe that it is appropriate to make these recommendations without consulting the experts the institution has hired (in whom the institution has invested time and resources) to work with these very issues? Certainly, when I raised this issue with colleagues from the Academic Affairs division at my university (the division that includes, logically enough, faculty and other instructional staff) they asked the same question. But why, more generally, would this consultant presume to proceed in the manner that this one has? Would the consultant recommend to a biologist - or even infer to them - how they should proceed with work about which s/he (the biologist) is an expert, like laboratory procedures?

The tens of readers to this list of course know the answer to this question: no, a retention consultant (or anyone else) wouldn't say to a biologist, "You've been conducting research on cell biology for years and I don't know much about it, but I'm going to recommend a procedure that you should use for your research because I think it's better." And this is but one more example of/reason why it's important that we comp/rhet people advocate for appropriate frames to surround our work. I'm in the process of doing that now, with the e-mails I've already sent and the memo that I've written. My guess is that, based on these documents and the alliances that we have built around campus, this will be a successful "adjustment." But this is work that I'm comfortable doing and know how to do because I've spent a long time thinking about how to do it, where the resources are for doing it, etc. One of the things that we in the field need to work on, I think (and "duh..." on this one) is actively developing strategies and resources so that everyone can engage in this work with some degree of comfort and acumen, too.

The &&(&*( Contract and More

2007-04-09T04:55:00.000-07:00

Big news item from EMU is that it looks like we're on the verge of getting a contract, finally. Apparently the union and the university are trying to figure out how to work domestic partner benefits after Michigan voters approved the incredibly _____phobic (insert your prefix: homo, xeno, etc.) defense of marriage act a couple of years ago, but apart from that it's all over but the shouting. We'll get raises (3.5 or so percent/year) for the next four years plus a little cash on top (which I don't get, but whatever) and we'll start paying for health insurance, which we should be doing. Why we all couldn't get to this point last September I'm not sure, but here we are. Hopefully with this behind everyone the university can turn its attention back to, say, running a university.

In other news, my gym friend Mark today reminded us (at 5:20, as we were waiting for the 5:30 opening time) that today is the fourth anniversary of the US military pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein. Good way to start the day. That, too, has worked out well - so glad that we've achieved victory in Iraq. :-/

Corruption in the Reading Ranks

2007-03-20T04:50:00.000-07:00

I'm in the middle of Reading for Profit: How the Bottom Line Leaves Kids Behind (edited by Bess Altwerger, published by Heinemann. It's a terrific - and terrifically, incredibly, distressing - collection. It's all about how reading research, especially research connected with Reading First (which is itself connected with NCLB) is unbelievably corrupt. There's misread/misinterpreted (intentionally) data, there's researchers serving as reviewers for their own work, there are publishing companies (McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin) making enormous profits from the reading programs that they market (whose 'validity' is proven by research by the people who developed the programs). Here's Elaine Garan's summary of the corruption:
.

...evidence-based critiques of the NRP show that there is a discrepancy between the actual data and the claims made in the official NRP summary that synthesized the findings (published by the NICHD in 2000). In other words, the claims don't match the data. It is the misrepresentations rather than the facts that are controlling education under the guise of science. (22)

The problem, of course, is that they *are* controlling education. These programs are all about phonics, and none about whole language. Thus, when people (say, education writers) look to the research as background for their stories about "effective educational methods," they see research that seems to be credible that attests to the effectiveness of phonics, and the problems with whole language. But as Garan and others in this book (and other ones, too, like Denny Taylor's Spin Doctors, which I've mentioned before) attest, the reported research findings are inaccurate. (In fact, Garan says, achievement levels decline as a result of the phonics-only curriculum.) This is the power of framing - because wedging in an argument about how these reports are inaccurate (especially when they're endorsed by "legitimate" sources) is a huge endeavor.

Barbara Cambridge, NCTE's K-12 policy director, has a post on the NCTE blog about a report on increased literacy in content areas. She notes that all of the recommendations have to do with learning through context, content, etc. - not through repetition of similar words ("cat, spat, rat").

Meanwhile, I learned yesterday (by looking at the Achieve web site) that Michigan's governor, Jennifer Granholm, is now on the Board of Directors of Achieve.org. See my earlier posts on that. Sigh.

Department of Ed/our friends' snake

2007-03-18T08:55:00.000-07:00

The other night, I had the opportunity to watch our friends Judith, Kathleen, and Emma's snake (a Mexican something or other) eat its once-weekly dinner. I won't go into too much detail here about the nature of the dinner (it was kind of gross, I thought), but the process was, shall we say, interesting. Basically, the snake (which is some kind of boa) "strangled" said dinner (even though it was already dead) and then swallowed it whole.

Not to be too dramatic here, but I think about the ways that the Department of Ed is padding around the accreditation process on tiny feet and the snake thing comes to mind pretty quickly. I've written about this padding around in the first (introductory) chapter of the OMB - here's part of what's there:

...if one listens closely to the steady drumbeat around the issue of accreditation that has sounded since the appearance of the report from the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education (which is closely analyzed in chapter four), it is possible to detect the tiny pitter patter of impending of federal control. The accrediting process, an Inside Higher Education story notes, can be “a wedge” for “measur[ing] and report[ing] how much students learn … because changes in accrediting standards … have the potential to directly influence hundreds or thousands of colleges” (1/29/07). Since the appointment of Undersecretary for Higher Education Sarah Martinez Tucker (also a member of the Spellings Commission) in January, the Department of Education has begun to speak publicly about changes to the DOE’s relationship with accrediting agencies. Traditionally, these agencies have urged institutions to establish outcomes and assessment methodologies for assessing those outcomes that make sense for the institution. As another Inside Higher Education story noted, “accreditors have primarily focused their judgment of institutions’ quality on whether an individual college is showing progress” (2/23/07), and have emphasized that long-term gains in the areas of process and professional development are as important (if not more important) than showing the agencies the results of any assessment. But the Spellings Report noted that this focus on process, not product, was not producing reliable evidence attesting to institutional accountability.

In early January 2007, the DOE official who oversaw accreditation agencies left his position. In mid-January 2007, the DOE initiated a process make changes to the rules governing the higher education accreditation process that would enable the DOE to legally regulate that process through accreditation agencies. Particularly alarming is the DOE’s desire to have institutions to institute norm-referenced assessments across similar colleges and universities (using criteria that are not yet determined) – in other words, “to judge how well individual college are educating their students by comparing them to similar institutions...” ( IHE 2/22/07). Second (and related), the DOE wants accrediting agencies to work with the institutions under their auspices to “agree to a core set of student achievement measures, both quantitative and qualitative, focused on those things the institutions have in common, and also on an acceptable level of performance for certain of those measures” (DOE white paper qtd in IHE, 2/22/07). The DOE has already taken steps of their own to initiate this kind of data collection, as well – they are on their way to developing a system called “Huge IPEDS” (or Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System), an online system that would cull data about how colleges and universities gather data about “accountability” on their campuses (e.g., whether they use the National Survey of Student Engagement, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or other national surveys administered locally on college/university campuses), and then would potentially make that data nationally available. The sound of footsteps is certainly there – and while accreditation agency officials such as Stephen Crow from the North Central Association/Higher Learning Commission and George Kuh from Indiana University are laying out clear and cogent issues with this kind of assessment process, their objections are largely being ignored.

A footnote to the bit above (linked to the part about the Collegiate Writing Assessment) is this:
Of particular interest to writing instructors about the Collegiate Learning Assessment, incidentally, is the small print at the bottom of the page describing the CLA’s “sample performance task” writing prompts: “Scoring of writing prompts is powered by E-Rater,an automated scoring technology developed and patented by the Educational Testing Service and licensed to CAE” (http://www.cae.org/content/pro_collegiate_sample_measures.htm).

Of course, the OMB is intended, in part, to help WPAs develop strategies to change (or get ahold of) stories about writing on their campuses. At the national level, there are a whole bunch of super smart people/agencies working on this, from the accreditation agencies (like ours, the North Central Association/Higher Learning Commission) to NCTE. But still, it's kind of like the snake thing. Fortunately, we educators are not like the object of the snake's attention. But still.

Take away message: if the tens of readers here who are connected with composition hear anything about accreditation (since that seems to be the first "action point" here) on your campus, see what's going on. And let's all be attuned to those seemingly not-so-important things that happen, say, around boring DOE processes (like the rule thing). It might be more than we think...

A really great movie and more

2007-03-16T15:25:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, as part of the (waning) "I'm on sabbatical" film festival, we watched "Stranger Than Fiction." I hear what you're saying: "I don't like Will Farrell" (even though I _do_ like Will Ferrell, myself). But even if you are saying that, you should RUN, don't walk, to get this movie. Why is it great?
*It's super literary - and remember, readers, that I am *not* a super literary, lit-degree type, so I'm not necessarily drawn to these things.
*It has mystery stuff in it (sort of)
*Will Ferrell and everyone else in the cast is great, esp. Dustin Hoffman
*It has a not entirely inaccurate portrayal of a faculty member's life (for a movie, anyway. It's not entirely accurate, either, but it's not too far off)

In other news, I finished the nth revision of the introduction to the OMB this week - it's still rough because I changed a ton, but it's getting there. For those of you who are familiar with the article/book writing process, you will know that finishing a draft of the intro means that I'm sort of nearing done-ness - because it's impossible to write anything coherent about what something will be about until it's nearly done. The only way anyone can know what writing is about, after all, is by writing. So that's something.

Next week is CCCC - that's the Conference on College Composition and Communication, in case among my tens of readers there is someone not in the field of composition. This is our big disciplinary conference. This year's is in New York, which should be fun. Best professional friend (her name for me, so I'm borrowing, too) and I get in around the same time on Tuesday, so we're going to do a fun thing, and then have a fun dinner with another friend of ours. After that it's pretty much all work, but it's work with other fun people who get together once or twice a year at most, so it's all pretty darned fun. And good food, too. Perhaps I'll adopt the Krause scale of restaurant reviewing: atmosphere, tastiness, and value.

Peter Elbow is a really, really smart guy

2007-03-07T04:51:00.000-08:00

I was re-reading the most recent collection of Peter Elbow's work, _Everyone Can Write_, yesterday. When I read Elbow, I think about something that Joe Harris wrote _about_ E. - something to the extent that while he doesn't always agree with everything that E. writes/says (in writing), he admires the way that E. is able to contradict himself in his writing and really turn things around. Both Joe Harris *and* P. Elbow are two of my favorite writers in our very excellent field (even though the subject line is about P. Elbow). I like them both because they write so very, very well - elegantly, clearly, and in complicated ways. I like messiness, and they're both all about the messiness. Elbow, especially, is about the messiness - but in most excellent ways. I'm reading _ECW_ again because I'm grappling with my own messiness for the OMB, trying to get it together for the big final push and write the last half of the intro and the first half of the conclusion (and then the draft is DONE! DONE! - I will have revised all of the chapters about a million times each...). Anyway - the last half of the first chapter is about working from principle, and how it is that one finds principles (which is a tough thing to write about, I think!), and Elbow is such a great example of working from p. He talks about it quite a bit in the essays in the first part of the book, actually, which I really like. I also love how incredibly positive he is - that is an absolute model for all of us. It's the "liking" thing - I still use "Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking" w/students because I think it's so important, that liking. So - hats off to Peter Elbow, because he is smart and his writing is so complicatedly terrific, even if - like Joe Harris - I don't always agree w/everything in it, either.

This hats-off post also reminds me of something that Crunchygranola wrote on _her_ blog about why she likes our field so much. I believe that included in her list - #1, even - is that we work with incredibly nice people. This field of ours is _full_ of nice people - and how cool is that? How many other people can go to their professional conferences (and Cs is coming up in a couple of weeks) and say, "Geez, there are smart and super excellent people in this field?" I contend that people generally don't even go into comp unless they are nice. You have to be interested in people and their ideas and all of that, and want to talk with them about that stuff, if you want to do this job. Of course, Crunchygranola herself is one of the most excellent people _in_ this field.

I'm all abuzz with niceness today, I guess. That's a good thing - maybe it's my mental counter to the snow that fell last night, or something.

Blogging absence

2007-03-06T05:30:00.000-08:00

Several people have noted my prolonged absence from the blogosphere - the tens of readers of this blog have been *clamoring* for information. However, in my defense, let me say this: I started this thing so I would do what we tell students to do: write every day. I have been writing every day - the OMB, but not the blog. And by the time I finish the OMB, the last thing I want to do is write some more.

Still, here I am. Some highlights of the last, oh, six months:
*much work on the OMB. Many, many drafts of all chapters. Many comments on drafts from many people. Much, much help. Thank goodness.

*holiday trip to Silver City, NM for a whole week! We spent time with my family, which was really fun and relaxing.

*trip to MEXICO over winter break. INCREDIBLE! I've never done anything like it! There was the heat, the sun, the warm ocean, the incredible snorkeling... phenomenal. I will post photos below. And I will write more often.

Now, cranking through the final push on the OMB. Getting ready for CCCC, which I have much to do for. (Nice sentence!) Getting ready to teach in May. Life is revving back up, which is okay with me. This sabbatical has been great, and I feel pretty restored... as it should be.

Now, see photos above. Ocean-y ones were taken from the balcony of our lovely condo. Flying pelicans - way cool. Iguanas abound.

Some vexing questions

2006-10-01T08:50:00.000-07:00

I've spent the last week transcribing interviews from the California trip and writing furiously, which is good. So much has happened, of course! There's the release of the Spellings Commission report, of course - that's coming to serve as a great example of one of my vexing questions. Then there's a pretty robust discussion on Kairosnews initiated by Charlie Lowe's post (something carried over from Charlie's blog, Cyberdash), featuring a letter that Charlie and Ellen Schendel wrote to the powers that be at Grand Valley State University about their plans to acquire a it-who-shall-not-be-named "plagiarism detection service." An employee of the company that markets i-w-s-n-b-n decided that he would participate in a discussion with various Kairosnews posters (me included, once I learned about it) about the service; meanwhile, the alternative position - as represented by Charlie and Ellen - has gotten some attention, which is nice. Becky Howard, too, was interviewed by the Bloomberg news people about the alternative position - also excellent.

But I started this post with the heading about vexing questions - so let me put those out there in the light of what's above. The q. has to do with some different ways of thinking about the goals (short, medium, long) of this work that I'm thinking about in the OMB, and people are above as well. One of the central tenets of strategies associated with community organizers for, say, the Industrial Areas Foundation (and the organizer I shadowed for this research works for the IAF) is that it's super important to be pragmatic. Doing the right thing - even if it's for the wrong reasons - is the most important thing. This parallels, I think, the idea of tactical strategies outlined in deCerteau's _Practice of Everyday Life_ - short term, tactical, take what you can and run, strategy of the weak, etc. Put this next to one of the central tenets of the idea of framing, that what will ultimately lead to change is reframing the ways that issues are represented. This is in some ways equivalent to deC's idea of strategy, because it's about big picture, long-term, views that shape things.

They don't go together too well. Take the Spellings doc. If we - and by "we" I mean the alleged consensus from which people speak when they speak of comp/rhet as a field (and I'm not sure that this exists, but that's another question entirely, also one I'm dealing with in the OMB [though not yet])... sorry. If "we" work with the Spellings Report in one way, it might be possible to use it as a wedge to 'get' some of the things "we" value. For ex., the Report mentions that it's important to support collaborations among hs/college teachers, that FIPSE should be re-funded (not refunded as in "give money back," but re-funded as in "give money to"). We could even take its calls for increased assessment and make cases four our assessment efforts. This all makes good sense to me - it's pragmatic, it works with what we've got. And that's sooooo important.

But then there's the frame of the report. And is it possible to work for what we want, with the report as incentive, without validating/participating in that frame, even if we're pushing against it? (I know, yes, that this is the way that most of "us" frame the work that we do in our comp classes, too... we say, to selves and to students, 'we are working with the conventions of these dominant discourses so that you/we can push against them and broaden them, so that are values are represented, etc.') Education, in this report, is a lot like building a car, and getting people ready to be better car builders. Even Spellings herself used this: "Choosing a college should be as easy as buying a car." And educating students is no longer about the whole 'democracy' thing (and I'm not sure I love that frame, either - more on that in a sec) - it's now about better, faster, stronger citizens who can be better, faster, stronger workers. Sort of like the 6 Million Dollar man, again.

So there's a vexing question.

Another thing I've come to realize, another vexing q. I've had my issues with the pedagogical strategy known as service-learning for a loooong time - since it became hot, in fact. But I finally was able to distill *why* I have issues, and it goes back to something I wrote a long time ago (almost 12 years ago, in fact). Even when it's done super well, it seems to me that s-l is framed as something that, as Bruce Herzberg put it, "helps students ... take responsibility for communal welfare." They gain a big picture view, they learn that problems aren't isolated, etc. (This is also a position that's represented as a good thing for framing social issues by orgs like The Opportunity Agenda.) But put that approach next to the IAF/Saul Alinsky's Iron Rule: Never do for people what they can do for themselves. I don't think students should be educated to take responsibility for social welfare; I think students should be educated (and again, this is a point I made a long time ago, so it's no new news) so that they can make some choices for themselves about when, where, and why they want to be heard, and raise their own stink if that's what they think is important. Maybe these aren't too different - though I think that they are. It's the difference between "being done to" and "doing for selves." I think the different ways of stating this frame two different assumptions about what students know, too. In the first, they don't know so much - for ex., about how to be responsible. In the second, they do.

It's something I'm thinking about/playing with, anyway....

More from Cal-i-for-ni-a

2006-09-21T20:40:00.000-07:00

First, some photos. These is from the chair at my brother's table (kitchen/dining room) where I sit while doing my work here in fabulous San Rafael (and I walked over to the wall o'windows to take one, too)

So that's pretty nice.

I'm on to the "media" part of my trip now - or maybe I should say the framing part. First, thanks to Anat Shenker-Osorio, who works with Real Reason in SF, I went to a presentation by Alan Jenkins, who works with a NY-based organization called The Opportunity Agenda. Both Real Reason and the OA work with the concept of framing, though in different ways. I met with Anat afterward; she explained the cognitive-based model that they use (which is related to the work that comes out of the Rockridge Institute). I think OA's approach is more culturally-situated, but I'll learn more tomorrow (because I'm seeing Alan Jenkins again, this time with people from The SPIN Project - and then I'm meeting them afterward).

What all of these people/orgs have in common (which also stems from Rockridge in many ways) is the idea of working in a framework that reflects important values (like "opportunity"), and works toward a positive (this is the "don't negate the frame" idea). For a lot writing-related purposes, for ex., a framework like "opportunity" can work really well in some ways.

But for other writing-related purposes - like plagiarism-related stuff - "opportunity" doesn't work as well. So part of our challenge is to figure out a variety of frames, and then choose from them.... Hey! That sounds *just* like the ways we talk about writing! Hmm. But of course, a *bigger* part - a MUCH bigger part, in fact - is to develop some win-able campaigns that these frames represent, and to make SURE that we have data to support the claims we make in those campaigns.

I also spent a lot of time in the past couple of days thinking about the work of the organizer from the Industrial Areas Foundation who I observed. It's all related, of course. The IAF works very much on cultivating grass-roots leaders. They don't identify issues; they have issues come from individuals and then work to link those together. And they work from stories, stories, stories. This is a very, very effective strategy for building a broad and super diverse base, I think. There are elements of the model that can change - maybe in subtle ways, maybe not-so-subtle - the ways that we work on WPs. For ex., what would it look like to "do a round" at the beginning of every meeting and ask everyone to tell one story about why the find this work cool? And then, from there (not at every meeting...) to ask people: what fires you up? What makes you angry? (The IAF works a lot on passion, and passion is always linked to anger...) Then you get a good list going, and everyone can vote on what they want to focus on, then develop campaigns from there. They might take what the IAF calls "research actions" - actions to gather more data or investigate issues - and certainly would take some strategizing. The idea, too, is to involve others -- not have the organizer (or WPA) do the driving. Sure, we might not get to the issues that the WPA thinks are absolutely key to address... but we would get to issues that came up from others, and others would likely be a lot more involved, because they would be leading. It's not hugely different from what a lot of us do, but it puts it in a broader context, and then the framing/publicity piece can be useful to advance things. Anyway - that's what I'm thinking thus far, anyway.

When Eleanor, the IAF organizer, and I were chatting today, we also were talking about the state of things in this somewhat depressing world more generally. All we can do is keep doing this work, right? Because climbing into bed and pulling the sheets over our heads... that's a bad option. Right? Right.

My California Trip

2006-09-20T20:39:00.000-07:00

Even for me, I haven't been posting much - it's been busy for reasons I'll write about in a sec. I've also been posting to the new fabulous blog created by on-line smart guy and EMU media star Steve Krause, EMU Talk. Steve's blog became the site for information about the recent faculty unpleasantness at EMU. He wanted to move on - understandably. But there was so much momentum for talk about EMU, he made the new site. It apparently has many subscribers already. Very, very smart... actual conversation among subscribers, who seem to come from all walks of EMU life - students, faculty, etc.

So apart from posting to EMU Talk, which I've done a couple of times now, I haven't written much here because I'm in California doing research for the not-as-OMB (but it will start appearing a lot more now). I'm in the San Francisco/East Bay area, conducting interviews and shadowing a community organizer. I've talked to some very, very, veryveryveryvery smaaaaart people thus far. Here are a couple of thoughts from among the many, maybe not so coherent because I'm very tired!

*Building relationships is key (or alliances) - but the relationships have to come about around issues that arise from the interests of everyone _in_ the alliances. This is important - it means that I need to re-think the way I've defined the work involved with this change stuff I'm thinking about in some ways... rather than define the issues we might/could/should work on, the issues need to come up from the allies. And who are these allies? I can think about this on several levels: people in WPs, sure. People outside? They should be. Can we do that around/through some boundaries, though? I'm thinking about that... and I'll talk to people about it tomorrow, too.

*Framing is a really useful strategy, but sometimes it's presented as an end. If that's the end, what does it do?

There's more, too - and I will write about it later, when I'm not quite so tired (and The Colbert Report isn't blasting through my brother's many TV speakers).

One more thing about California, though - well, two.
1. The weather? It is faaaabbbbuuuullllooouuuuss. Fabulous. Beautiful, sunny, spectacular. This is a very beautiful place. The only problem is that if you (or I) want to go anywhere, it takes a lot of driving.

2. There's a lot of really, really, really good food here. On the Krause tastiness-ambience-cost scale, I've had nothing but 10-10-10s - even tonight, when we went to a burger place. But really gooood burgers - cheap, and we sat outside. How cool is that?

EMU non-strike - request for fact-finding

2006-09-13T13:38:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I attended the latest EMU-AAUP meeting. I was out of town for the last meeting (in Pittsburgh), so this was my first meeting since the strike started. For those who want to cut to the chase (and aren't reading Steve Krause's blog, which is really the official unofficial information source on the strike), I'll cut to the chase - the results of the meeting - before continuing:
*with the interests of EMU students firmly in mind, the AAUP has again taken the moral high road and asked the university to submit to fact-finding. This is apparently a lengthy process - months long - and while it takes place, we have agreed to teach under the terms of the old (expired) contract. The university must agree with this request, but come on -- do they really want faculty out there picketing? (No - don't answer that.)

*this means that faculty will be in the classroom, where we belong. Whew! But this struggle isn't over by a long shot.

The problem here, basically, is that there are forces at work - forces like, say, the regents - who don't seem to like faculty, value our work, or believe that we should have a union (or a contract, or any kind of humane working conditions). I don't think that many of our administrators share this belief, though I think that some at the top do.

Now, let me say this. I am a person who eats her proverbial lunch on working strategically with others. I have always proceeded from the assumption that it's best to work proactively, in the interests of shared governance and mutual cooperation, to avoid situations just like this. But it takes two to tango. I tend to be extremely, extraordinarily optimistic, too - but I just don't see the other side dancing here. It's a whole different level of working, but I'm rolling up my sleeves. This place is too good, our students too cool, to let our faculty (and our work) be dismissed and insulted.

So - not ideal because I see long-term work, but at least we're back in the classroom (and by "we" I'm speaking collectively, of course, because I remain on sabbatical)...

My Trip to Pittsburgh, the economy, and the strike

2006-09-09T12:18:00.000-07:00

As readers of Steve Krause's blog know well, EMU faculty are now in day 9 of our strike. I cannot begin to express how distressing this is. EMU is a fantastic place to work, and I feel confident - still - that when this is resolved it will remain a fantastic place to work. We have great faculty colleagues, a terrific new department head, a great dean (who is right now the head of the administrative negotiating team), a provost who cares... it's a great place. The problem is at the very tippy-top, and I hope the many layers between us and that layer stay in place.

But I'm just back from Pittsburgh, where I participated in a symposium sponsored by Bedford-St. Martins, publishers extraordinaire (and I mean that). I was doing a workshop on assessment that focused on identifying projects with the current national situation and the public policy issues stemming from that situation well in mind. It was a lot of fun - great conversations, smart folks. It was kind of ironic, being there and talking about all of this stuff with this strike going on.

While I was travelling, I had conversations with two Northwest flight attendants (barred by court injunction from striking; dealing with a 40% pay cut over the last few years, working for an airline that seems determined to drive its workers into the ground); a Northwest ticket agent (jobs being phased out after the holiday travel season; they will be 'replaced' by those automatic boarding-pass-issuing machines and a few outsourced workers); a cab driver whose wife worked for U.S. Air (union refused a contract with a moderate pay cut; jobs were eliminated and moved to Santo Domingo); and the driver of the shuttle to the airport parking lot where I left my car (non-unionized, working for $6.00/hour, can't leave the parking lot to eat lunch). I'm not sure where all of these conversations left me, apart from depressed. Our strike situation sucks, but I don't think we're in quite the same boat as these folks. Then again, it's the stinking Bush economy that's landed us all in this situation if you want to put it in really, really, really big picture terms. I'm trying not to be morose about all of this - and I did decide as I was getting on the plane from Pittsburgh to fly home that I just have to be very zen and trust that things will work out, short and long-term, but it's an incredibly difficult situation.

Meanwhile, I wrote an e-mail - at about 7 this morning, before I'd had any coffee - to John Fallon. Because it was so stinking early (and I was writing this in the lobby of the Pittsburgh Holiday Inn), I forgot to send myself a copy - and I was working on our webmail system, which doesn't save messages. But the gist of the thing was that as a faculty member in comp/rhet., where our jobs involve communicating with various audiences and helping students learn to do same, this situation is anethema; that our students are suffering enormously; that all the administration has to do is come back and *talk*, for goodness sake, and we could probably have this thing wrapped up. But I'm not sure they want it wrapped up. They haven't even sought a court injunction to get people back in the classroom, which is a move that I think many - maybe all - of the faculty would *love.*

Tomorrow, picketing around the EMU mansion. Of course, it's surrounded by security fences... but maybe it will make a difference. Hopefully. I hope.

Striking Faculty Member(s)

2006-09-06T08:07:00.000-07:00

So as an EMU faculty member, I'm officially on strike. I've had mixed feelings about this strike all along - I don't think it was in the best interests of the university - but I also don't think that a contract that offered AAUP members a pay cut was in the best interest of the university, either. Be that as it may, the last contract offer apparently netted us a small pay increase. But the union turned it down (because that was their p**()*)(ing contest) and the administration walked away from the negotiations, saying that they're not returning until the strike has ended (because that's theirs). So now there's an impasse over what is probably something like 1/2 a percent or some such minimal amount. I think the union wasn't smart to take the offer, but I think the administration are being complete jerks. I'm sure that their negotiating team has little say in their actions - there are bigger powers, and bigger issues, at work here. And it sucks. Everyone should read Steve Krause's blog on this - he's more in touch with things than I am, and probably less morose, too.

More on John Hodgeman

2006-08-31T12:45:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting on the floor in Halle Library waiting for various teachers from Livonia middle and high schools, folks/friends with whom I have collaborated in a teacher-research group for six years. They will invariably get lost trying to find our meeting room after they have doubtless gotten lost trying to find parking.

What I should be doing:
writing an AQIP report Gisela Ahlbrandt, fabulous co-chair, and I have to finish by September 7 (it's short)
working on my presentation for the Bedford-St. Martin's workshop I have to do in Pittsburgh a week from tomorrow
making up my mind about whether I should drive or fly to Pittsburgh, something I am obsessing over in grossly unhealthy and odd ways that say to me that I am kind of overwhelmed, and because I'm processing the big things pretty well, I'm going to spin on this small thing endlessly

What I am doing:
looking at John Hodgeman's web site and John Hodgeman's blog - cool! Amber Cobb Vasquez, fabulous former EMU ga, just sent me this. Amber is smart. John Hodgeman is smart. Fabulous sites. I don't think I posted the link of Hodgeman's very, very, very funny Daily Show monologue about the US News (or whomever) writing contest here - check it out.

The wiki is back, and more

2006-08-30T16:42:00.000-07:00

So the Steves - that's Steve Krause and Steve Benninghoff - rebuilt the wiki. It's sort of like the bionic man... we can build it better. It's not there yet, but it will be... eventually. And thanks to Amber Cobb Vazquez, a lot of the content is back. The FYWP home page is not yet back... but that will get there.

It's "intensive" time in ENGL 596, which has been great - a great group of GAs. In the not great department is the potential strike at EMU. Strike authorization vote was today, which passed overwhelmingly - no surprise there. And while I am not in favor of striking, I am also not in favor of a pay cut, which is about where we are on the administration's current offer. Seriously...

The good news is that I received the third season of Arrested Development as a gift. Exccceeelllleeent escape.

Things that suck

2006-08-21T17:09:00.000-07:00

You know what really sucks? Putting about a million hours (and not my hours, either - my hours, plus Emily Dillon's hours, plus Steve Krause's hours, plus Steve Benninghoff's hours) into a cool new server and wiki, and then having someone STEAL THE SERVER.

That sucks.

And don't go to writing.emich.edu/fywp anymore, either... because some jerk is carrying it around in our server. Same with writing.emich.edu/fywpwiki.

Stink-y!

At least no one lost a limb.

Spellings Report

2006-08-13T09:24:00.000-07:00

Well, the final draft of the Spellings Commission report is out. Interestingly, when I tried to find the URL for it to link it here, no dice - the Department of Ed web site has a link to a page that explains that the site is down right now. (Conspiracy, no doubt... or maintenance on a Sunday in summer. Whatever.) Here, though, is a story from a blog called ePluribas Media that has what I think is a very reasonable summary of the draft, along with links to previous drafts and a description of the process. I'll add that blog to my roll, too, I think.

So the Commission's final report isn't calling for standardized tests per se, but some kind of standardized assessment.

Meanwhile, the WPA listserv has been abuzz both with talk about the Commission report and some ideas (from me and others) about possible responses. My idea: come up with an exandable database of assessment possibilities that institutions can adapt for their purposes so that we have some common foundations for assessment, and maybe that will keep the wolves at bay.

Another big subject on the WPA list, though, has been the new plagiarism policy at Syracuse, which Becky Howard worked to craft. Here (yay, yay, yay) is evidence that public work can have an effect. It's just that it takes such a stinking long time.

These aren't the easiest times, goodness knows. There's this. There's Israel-Lebanon, which makes this look like nothing. But we need to do what we can, right? Fight the good fight? Glass half full... even if, as one of my friends from the gym said this a.m., it's half full of Tang.

Back from The Beav

2006-08-09T05:28:00.000-07:00

Is it any wonder why we love Beaver Island? (sorry for the weird formatting, btw - if it is weird.) The photo with lots of blue water is from Donegal Bay, which is on the other side of the island from where we stay - a whole 3 miles away. The sunset photo is from the beach in front of our 4-plex, which we reach by crossing the lawn and going through the little gate in the last photo here... it's probably about 60 yards. I like the sunsets on "our" side (the east side) better than those on the Donegal side, even though that's where the sun goes down, because the light is much more interesting and dramatic. Ahhhh... Beaver.

This year, apart from a few medical issues with one of the kids (all fine, ultimately), was excellent as always. The excitement of the year was the new island map, which included (for the first time) trails through the woods. Our friend Maria and I did a great trail ride; I did one on my own, as well. As I was tearing through the woods on Nora's bike I thought, "this is why people like to bike!" Way fun.

And now, I'm back at it. Planning ENGL 596, which starts in a week - I'm teaching the two weeks chunk, but that's it for the year. If anyone knows how to easily post photos in a WordPress blog, e-mail me! Also if you know how to get photos in flickr on to the blog in flickr. Krause is in Europe, the weasel, so I'm figuring some of this out myself (though Benninghoff has been a HUGE help and I don't want to burden him too much!).

I'm a PC

2006-07-27T13:52:00.000-07:00

See what I learn from reading my blog links? I just learned from Steve Krause's blog that the "I'm a PC" guy is the same guy (John Hodgeman) from The Daily Show. I love those ads. And now I've made an important cultural connection.

I should read my friends' blogs more often. And other blogs, too.

blogging absence

2006-07-27T13:21:00.000-07:00

Wow - almost a month since my last post. If I'm going to do this blog thing, I'd better get serious about it! But it's been a busy month, so there's a logic here. First I went to Vermont with the spousal unit, which was very fun. Then I came back and quickly headed out to the WPA conference , so there was a week. Then I spent about 36 hours in Chicago with my friend Melanie, formerly of Ann Arbor/NYC soon to be formerly of Minneapolis and back in NYC. Then I came back and worked furiously on stuff, and now - tomorrow - I will start (and finish) the preparations to go to lovely Beaver Island. I'll put a photo of this lovely spot above so that we can all gaze upon its loveliness.

In conjunction with the OMB, I've recently re-read some of James Carey's work - I mentioned him a few posts ago (though it was more than a few weeks ago - see above re: very few posts). I may have mentioned - probably did - that I read Carey's Communication as Culture in my very first grad school class, and that it totally wowed me. It was almost visceral, it was so exciting to think about communication as Carey described it. And you know what (you generic "you"s)? I still get that reading Carey. His ideas remind me, yet again, why I went into this whole intellectual thinking thing. How cool is that? Here's a little passage that illustrates what I think is so fabulous about Carey's ideas from an essay called "The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse":
"What we mean by democracy depends on the forms of communication by which we conduct politics. What we mean by communication depends on the central impulses and aspirations of democratic politics. What we mean by public opinion depends on both. None of these phenomena are natural, none of the terms transcendent, all are foudn only within history: they exist only within language, within the particular historical conjunctures in which we define them."

Carey writes elsewhere about the ways in which communication doesn't reflect reality as something that is objective and "out there," but also doesn't create it as if there is no reality... the careful and smart balance he strikes is super compelling (and why he's considered to be aligned with *American* cultural studies, which blends pragmatism and cultural critique, rather than just engaging in the cultural critique that is typical of European cultural studies). He's an incredibly clear writer, and his ideas are so passionate, so compelling... so so.

And on that note, I'm now going to clean my mucky desk surface so I return to a lovely and organized study after my blissful week away. I probably will not think much about James Carey. But I do consider myself lucky to be able to think about these things, that's for sure!

Text and Image Class

2006-06-23T05:44:00.000-07:00

While I'm on sabbatical (which technically starts in the fall, but whatever) I've vowed to take art classes almost all the time. This is partly because the side of my brain that does stuff like art (right? left? can't remember) is puny and atrophied... while the other side is big and overdeveloped. So it's a balance thing. It's also because I really like it, of course - and that's really the first reason.

So I'm in my first class now, a text and image workshop taught by Lynn Avadenka . So far, I'm enjoying it HUGELY. Lynn gave us a poem to work with - a cool and funny poem (by a poet whose name I can't remember) - and we divided it up into lines. We're typesetting the lines (by hand), and then illustrating the typset pages with images that resonate for some reason with us vis a vis the lines. My lines are great- they have to do with the author of the poem trying not to be loud and out there, which resonates with me. :-) Last night I messed around with some of the elements I wanted to use in my illustrations - bubble wrap (which worked fabulously) and cool textured paper that I bought at Hollander's, which is where the workshop is being held. I was trying to do pressure printing with these - so last night I first inked a plexiglass plate and put the stuff on that, then put the paper on that and used the tympan (the heavy roller on a printer) to press the paper into the ink. Cool, but too dark. After a few tries, Lynn suggested inking the elements, not the plate, and rolling the paper over - beautious. When it's done, I'll take a photo and post it. (That will be a few weeks.) It's WAY cool, though. I'm into these art classes that don't involve drawing, since that just doesn't work for me. But collaging kinds of things, like this? Yes. And of course jewelry, which I still enjoy making and don't do nearly enough.

Long dark tea time

2006-06-19T04:41:00.000-07:00

Not really a long dark tea time, actually... though that is one of the titles of a chapter, or something, from one of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy chapters or sequels. I've been listening to the radio version of Life, the Universe, and Everything at the gym lately (because my daughter got it as a bat mitzvah present last year, and so it got put in the iTunes to go on her iPod, and we synched, then, from the same computer...). Anyway -- highly entertaining. I recommend it to any/all reading this.

It has been a while since an entry, however. Work continues on the OMB, though I've focused my energies mostly on preparing for the WPA conference in a few weeks. The heavy travel season starts soon. A week from today I'll head to Indianapolis to visit with Crunchy Granola for one of our blitz writing efforts. I'll come back from that trip and the spousal unit and I will depart for a week of actual vacation with no computer in Vermont... by ourselves, too, since our daughter will be at camp. I return from that and it's off to Chattennooga for the conference.

Working on the paper for WPA has been quite useful for the "principle" chapter of the OMB. As some of my earlier posts indicate, I've been wrestling over the idea of tikkun olam. My wrestling came from trying to figure out how to move this concept from one realm to another, with my own discomfort with writing much about myself (apart from my 'academic' self, that is), with my sense that I have to be an "expert" on what I'm writing about, and there's just no freakin' way that I'm going to be an expert on Judaic concepts in the same way, say, that the authors of the various books I'm reading are. But my good friend Sherry sent me a key e-mail in the midst of this wrestling suggesting that admitting that I'm no expert, but that I try to live this concept, is a good thing -- after all, aren't we all trying to figure out how to make this stuff work? That was a huge help. So in its current (conference paper) state I define the concept, use a story from Rabbi Hillel to make the point that defining is easy, but enacting is hard, and then go from there. In the OMB chapter I'll spend some more time with it, writing about the evolution and interpretation, but I still think I'll move to enacting. And that's all good.

In other news, Steve Krause has developed a spankin' new web site for our writing program - check it out, especially the banner photo and the About Emus link. (Not that the rest of it isn't good, but...) EMU clearly missed a golden opportunity when they didn't adopt an emu for their mascot, but we in the FYWP won't do the same.

James Carey

2006-05-25T10:22:00.000-07:00

My colleague Christine Tracy just e-mailed to say that James Carey has died. Very sad... Carey was a *terrific* writer and thinker, and one of the first 'academic' sources that I found meaningful and cool when I went back to grad school. My first quarter (Fall 1989) I took the mandatory "Theories of Mass Communication" class with Ted Glasser (a tremendous teacher, btw). Carey's Communication and Culture was one of the books required for the class. I remember going to Ted at one point early in the quarter with a classmate, complaining that the book was "hard and super academic" (or something like that); Ted said that he was surprised because he thought it was super accessible. A good example of discourse in action, because now I agree with Ted. But I digress.

When I was in grad school, Carey was known as an "American cultural studies" guy. His work brought together ideas from pragmatism, European cultural studies, phenomenology... lots of places. His were some of the first theories that made 'sense' to me - his analysis of communication as a ritual (versus a 'transmission') model, for instance, still circulates through my own thinking about literacy and ed. His work helped me understand that communication went WAY beyond "media" to that Wittgenstein-ian notion of constructing reality through language (and communication)... and did so in terms that were accessible (as Ted Glasser promised!) and super intriguing. I still have C and C on a readily-accessible bookshelf...

Cold Fire and other inspirational texts

2006-05-16T12:33:00.000-07:00

I've just finished a book called Cold Fire, about the work of Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) organizer Ernesto Cortes and the IAF philosophy. Very, very interesting. The IAF's primary role is to teach people to organize/be organizers... they've been incredibly effective. They work primarily through churches and church-affiliated organizations. It's helpful for me to think about the link that the author, Mary Beth Rogers, sees (and Cortes articulates) between faith - in this case, Catholic/Christian faith - and the work that these organizations do.

Equally interesting - maybe even more - are the ideas about building structure and motivating people here. I don't want to mis-summarize them because I'm still thinking about them - and they're pretty complicated (in a straightforward way). But several things seem relevant:
*this model is a lot about conversation - talking to people, learning about their interests, working from those. This echoes Alinsky's principle of appealing to peoples' self-interest, of course (because Alinsky was the founder of the IAF, so this extends out from his ideas...)
*this model is also about teaching/education. We can do teaching and education - that *is* what we do. Here, the organizations that Cortes and others work with are educating about some pretty basic, humanitarian needs -- like clean water, drainage, and the like. What we're advocating for is not nearly as important at a survival level... it's not AIDS research, as we always say around the writing program. (Or, as Ed Katz said in a presentation on Gen Ed at EMU, "It's just college.") Not to say it's not important, but...

More, too ... but I need to ponder some more. I also need to ponder the connections between this book and Politics the Wellstone Way, which I also read last week and found quite useful. There are some *very* useful tools in that book that I think are SO important - like a chart for articulating 'your message,' 'what your opponents are saying about you,' 'what you are saying about your opponents' ... all of this makes me wonder what "our message" is. I have to remember that I'm working at the local level, though - certainly, on our campuses we have a message. Grassroots. Grassroots. That's what we know best, those local contexts - and that's where we can be most effective. I am interested in learning more about what NCTE is doing, too, of course - and I can do that, as well. But my focus is local. Mantra: local local local.

Speaking of NCTE, a little kvell here: Nora was one of 200 national winners of the NCTE Promising Young Writers Awards. Pretty cool! And the week before, she and her partner James were state champs in one of their Science Olympiad events (Food Science). What a smartie!

New ACT Report - "Ready to Succeed"

2006-05-08T05:14:00.000-07:00

New in today's Inside Higher Ed - a story on a new ACT report, Ready to Succeed. The refrain here will sound familiar. The definitions of "readiness" for college composition here are entirely linked to mechanics, syntax, and organization (and maybe they would say, "But the content comes in the separate "reading" outcomes, but I think that's just wrong). And here's the "research" that supports their assertions:

Our research has documented levels of proficiency on the EXPLORE®, PLAN®, and ACT
score scales that are associated with success in college—defined as a 50/50 chance of earning a course grade of B or better or a 75 percent chance of earning a C
or better—in typical entry-level college courses.

It probably comes as no surprise that EXPLORE and PLAN are ACT products - and so is the ACT, of course. What other industry supports its products with research based on those products? What STUNS me is that few outside of academe seem to point out the circular logic here.

The regularity with which these reports appear is depressing. Clearly, we need to ratchet up some studies of our own -- with better methodology and smarter analysis and discussion. This is basically a marketing tool for the K-12 curriculum that ACT is marketing... but why don't audiences recognize that? (Rhetorical question there... I know a lot of the reasons, but I find them depressing, too.)

I posted a response (which I was going to paste in here, but I copied something else and nuked the response from the copy memory, and I can't "back" to it in my browser anymore). Talking points in the response: college compositionists have higher standards than those outlined in the ACT report because ours include *content* (also put in the URL for the WPA Outcomes Statement), and the circular logic piece. Check for that on the IHE web site...

The College Board and others - the HUGE challenges ahead

2006-05-03T05:07:00.000-07:00

A story in today's Inside Higher Ed reports that SAT scores are down - "there was a four-to-five point decline, on average, comparing scores this year to last, excluding the new writing test," according to the IHE story. The College Board is insisting that the tests are valid; some of the college and univ. officials quoted in the story are distressed because they're placing students in "support" programs based on their scores and finding that they 'don't need to be there.'

Perhaps, if we're lucky, this will be one more strike against the College Board - fingers are crossed on that one. Meanwhile, the fingers of the College Board are *everywhere*. Sure, they have the SAT. They also have COMPASS (or ACCUPLACER - I can't remember which one), an odious and irresponsible test used for placement at the college level (the writing version is heavy on the grammar). My institution doesn't use it (over my laid out and screaming body, in fact), but a fair number of community colleges do. They're also marketing curriculum at the K-12 level, as is ACT. And of course, the College Board is also behind The National Commission on Writing, whose reports have been criticizing the writing abilities of nearly everyone - students, workers, government workers -- and, coming soon, writing in universities (see earlier post on the NASULGC survey). The National Writing Project has representation on the National Commission on Writing, thankfully, so there's at least the potential for some sanity there. Nevertheless, I see it as another effort by the CB to in part generate the kind of 'news' that justifies their work through/with their testing, curriculum, and marketing efforts.

All of this makes me think even more about my recent involvement with a group here in Michigan that was charged with re-writing the secondary (7-12) content standards for English Language Arts in Michigan. This group was incredibly ably chaired by my colleague Rebecca Sipe, who did an unbelievable job navigating us through some very tumultuous waters. The state of Michigan has signed on with The American Diploma Project, a project of the right-wing educational foundation Achieve.org. Their goal is to standarize curriculum and grade-level testing across schools and, eventually, across states. Our Michigan committee, a terrifically smart group of people from whom I learned an enormous amount, worked to balance the draconian Achieve/ADP standards with what we knew to be best practices for teachers and students. We rejected the fundamental premises of the ADP standards - the assumptions about what reading and writing were in those standards simply did (/does) not reflect the actual experience of any teachers that any of us had encountered, nor our own experience as teachers.

Through the ADP process, the standards are 'reviewed' by university-level "experts" and business leaders (because that's what we're about in education, right? Getting people ready for business? We are in the ADP vision...) in separate sessions. The university feedback session (of which I was also a part) was enlightening, to say the least. There were a group of very angry people in that room - not angry about the content standards, which we all agreed were pretty good, but angry about the ADP standards to which the MI standards were supposed to be tied. They also rejected the ways that reading and writing were cast there. It was an interesting moment... one person, a lit professor (from I'm not sure where), said of the ADP standards something like, "I'm a pretty conservative guy, but these standards make me look like Michael Foucault." We also were supposed to 'match' the MI standards with ACT standards, since Michigan is moving toward using the ACT as a state assessment (rather than our current tests, the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, or MEAP) - and, at least for writing/English language arts, those are even more draconian.

Anyway - thanks to the hard work of the authoring group and Becky Sipe's extremely able leadership, Michigan's current content standards are pretty okay, I think. But apparently when they were rolled out to teachers and administrators last week, the state Board of Ed chair was also talking about developing the grade-level tests that would go with them. Not sure how that will work... and not sure what's ahead for all of this. It also will start affecting us at the college level sooner or later.

The problem: the ways that these stories, discussions, etc. frame "writing" and "reading" runs counter to everything that we know about writing and reading and the ways people learn them. Of course, that's the topic of the OMB, and I won't go into that here. Still, some things to think about as I move through life...

Cool wiki

2006-04-30T07:26:00.000-07:00

For the many billions who are undoubtedly reading (!!), check out the *very* cool work that students in my graduate basic writing class ("Teaching Basic Writing at the College Level") did on their CompFAQ basic writing wiki:
http://comppile.tamucc.edu/wiki/BasicWriting/BestPractices

First, let me say thanks to three people: Glenn Blalock and Rich Haswell, who were *fabulous* partners on this (they did everything from reviewing the assignment to providing feedback to students), and Tim Gustafson, who hosted a module on the "Teaching Composition" listserv on using wikis that gave me the idea to start with. This project was far cooler than I imagined it would be. Students took it HUGELY seriously, working on many, many, many drafts of the wiki entries. It was also a great way to do "research work" in the course - everyone worked very hard on focusing their questions as they went, deciding what they really were doing, and writing tightly and smartly. I also loved the collaborative nature of the project. They wrote/posted, we all read... it was great. And it will continue to *be* great because of the nature of the wiki, which is terrific. A great way to end the term!

My swimming head

2006-04-18T11:59:00.000-07:00

An interesting subject line. My head isn't really swimming per se... just full of ideas.

I spent this morning (re-, in one case) reading a couple of books for my oft-mentioned book (hereafter OMB) - Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts and Kitchen Cooks, Plate Twirlers, and Troubadours. The first chapter of my OMB has to do with working from a point of principle, as I may have mentioned. The principle, in this case, is that of tikkun olam, which is translated as repairing/restoring/healing (etc.) the world.

Now, before I proceed I will say that Dwight D. Eisenhower's admonition to Richard Nixon regarding the vice presidency (which I will not repeat - this is a PG blog) will eventually apply here, but I'm not a procrastinator in any sense of the word... yet, I've been carrying this book in my head, with not enough time to write it, for longer than I've ever carried any project. So - it feels like an eternity to me, and eventually it will be time to do the Eisenhower/Nixon thing. But not yet. Continuing...

Today, I'm thinking about writing this tikkun olam chapter. I find that I'm wrestling with several things - and I haven't yet started to write yet, so they will doubtless resolve themselves through writing (that always happens to me). They are these:

Academic convention would have me cite nearly everything I write. Yet, I don't know everything about tikkun olam, Judaism, etc. that there is to know ... and I never will. If I try to read everything that there is, I'll never do it, because...

Judaism is a culture (and a religion) based on intellectual dialogue and analysis. There is a loooong history in Judaism of discussion and debate with very little resolution - this is just the way it is. An example: one chapter in Back to the Sources focuses on Talmud, rabbinical commentaries on the Torah [the first five books of the Bible]. The chapter's author, Robert Goldenberg, is focusing on a portion of the Babylonian Talmud that asks, "From what time may people reciete the evening Shema From the hour that the priests come in to eat of their Heave-offering" (143). Referring to the Talmudic commentary - which is by several people and covers a large page (he writes that the effort to combine all of these ideas into a single whole "was undeniably a worth aim, but it has sometimes turned the Talmudic conversation into a gathering where everyone is talking at once [142]), Goldenberg says, "It may seem that this is all a practical discussion an effort to decide when in fact the time for Shema arrives and then to produce convenient test for determining whether that moment has come.

It is important to keep in mind that this is not at all the true purpose of the passage... the practical question at hand is never explicity resolved, while the answer accepted by later tradition ... actually is provided in this passage but receives no particular attention" (143-4).

So - Judaic thought, like academe, tends toward the citational practice, the rootedness in text and authority... this is, as Keith Gilyard has written, no new news. But there is a history, a convention, a culture, a tradition of no resolution - just continuing debate - so if I wanted to ground myself in sources, I could be there forever. (And I'm not trying to cop out of research, either...). Then there's the fact that

My tendency is to write "academically," from sources, and not from/about my own experience. I am no 'creative writer,' meaning I don't generally write about myself in any kind of personal way save as a WPA, a teacher, etc. This chapter, focusing as it does on a point of personal principle, is going to take more than that if it's to be at all good, which of course I want it to be. But personal stuff generally isn't academic-y and cited (which I'm obviously using as a shorthand for a whole set of postures and practices). That's where some of the essays in Kitchen Twirlers are good models... also some other stuff that I haven't yet gotten to.

So - a dilemma that I am thinking through. I will of course resolve by writing and writing and writing... because that's how I work through these things.

Day after the CSW/First full day of Passover

2006-04-13T05:01:00.000-07:00

The CSW was a HUGE success, as always. I saw some fantastic student work! A couple of groups in Emil Brehm's class made terrific DVDs that included material from their community research *and* some really smart work with different genres (like commercials); one of Amy McBain's students made a fantastic PowerPoint with material from her observations in two different dance classes at EMU; Rin Flannery's students did fantastic genres based on their I-Search papers; one of Erin VanderWall's students made a *quilt* - a real quilt! - with various genres from her observation at a senior center ... it was amazing, as always! (I'm not even mentioning the incredible PVC pipe constructions that Michele Salmon's class made... or their matching t-shirts [Salmon's Fishies].) Incredible! Pictures coming soon. And video, too. I asked lots of the multi-media folks to get me copies of their stuff so we could load that on our coming soon, *new* FYWP web page. Steve Krause has just let me know that the PB wiki site for the FYWP is ready to roll... so now I just need to make stuff in it. Sure! Seriously, I'm thinking that maybe at least with the multimedia we can get some of what students do. We take photos, but they don't come even remotely close to capturing the energy in the event... it's just way too cool, too loud, too crowded, to show in a photograph.

So after I left the CSW - and after I found my accursed keys, which I had apparently left on a table and then spent forty minutes zooming around campus to try to find (only to locate them in the lost and found in the union), I went to our traditional first night of Passover seder with our friends Kathleen and Judith. It was terrific fun, as always (though I am currently suffering the after effects of eating too much charoset/matzoh/horseradish; too much matzoh ball soup; waaaaayyy too many macaroons). I love Passover - it's my absolute favorite holiday. There's the food, of course, which is quite important. But more than that, it really is a terrific springtime ritual. It feels like a time of new beginnings (which it's supposed to, of course). I also really, really like that it's something that's happening in roughly the same way in houses, apartments, tents, everything around the world, where there's no official leader, where people are building on a cultural tradition that is thousands of years old. It brings together everything I like about being Jewish.

Speaking of which (being Jewish, that is), I'm currently reading Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, which is terrific. I haven't gotten through a Roth book since I read Goodbye, Columbus when I was in high school, but this is a great book for a lot of reasons. It has a great description of the hard-to-grasp-if-you're-not-Jewish distinction between Jewish culture and Jewish religion, for one thing. Here it is!

Their (the Roth family, the main characters in the novel) being Jews didn't issue from the rabbinate or the synagogue or from their few formal religious practices.... Their being Jews didn't even issue from on high. To be sure, each Friday at sundown, when my mother (and touchingly, with the devotional delicacy she'd absorbed as a child from watching her own mother) lit the Sabbath candles, she invoked the Almighty by his Hebrew title but otherwise no one ever made mention of "Adonoy." These were Jews who needed no large terms of reference, no profession of faith or doctrinal creed, in order to be Jews, and they certainly needed no other language - they had one, their native tongue, whose vernacular expressiveness they wielded effortlessly and, whether at the card table or while making a sales pitch, with the easygoing command of the indigenous population. Neither was their being jews a mishap or an achievement to be "proud" of. What they were was what they couldn't get rid of -- what they couldn't even begin to want to get rid of. Their being Jews issued from their being themselves, as did their being American. It was as it was, in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and veins, and they never manifested the slightest desire to change it or deny it, regardless of the consequences. (220)

What's very, very smart about this passage - and also very, very great for the book I'm working on (and will soon begin working a lot more on, after the school year ends) is that it speaks to the idea of "assimilation" (which is a concern that some more observant Jews have about less observant Jews), and to the idea that Judaism just _is_. It's in the DNA. The aforementioned new book of mine (which, as I think I mentioned in a previous post, is about affecting public policy discussions about writing and writer) begins with a chapter on working from principle, and there - very, very oddly for me, because I really don't write about "personal" stuff - I write about the principle of tikkun olam, or repairing/restoring/rebuilding the world, which is a principle that evolves from Talmudic readings of parts of the Torah (but actually first appeared in the Kabbalah. Long story here that I won't go into.) So this is going to mean writing about how I work this into my life, and into my work as a WPA and a teacher - which it does, but it's not something I'm used to talking about or explaining, really, to anyone but myself. So - it will be challenging in lots of ways, but it will be good challenging. The Plot Against America is also very smart (to me, anyway - I'm not sure Roth meant this to be there, but I see it) about this idea of assimilation... I won't go into the plot details here (read the book!), but the main character (Philip Roth)'s brother Sandy rejects the family's life as assimilated/American Jews for some of the novel (I'm not done with it, so I can't say if it's for all of the book) and wants to give up all of his cultural experience to become "American." Anyway ... still chewing over this one, but it's a DARNED good book, and very useful for my own thinking.

Celebration of Student Writing day

2006-04-12T11:27:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in the ballroom waiting for the beginning of our Celebration of Student Writing , the "big event" in our First-Year Writing Program at EMU. It's the calm before the storm time - people have been setting up since 8am, and at 4pm we'll open the door to the 1100 students (and that doesn't even count the visitors!) who are participating in the CSW. (I'll update the pics on our web site after this year's CSW - maybe next week.)

This event is pretty cool, I have to say. I've been here for every one for the last six years (and we do it twice a year), and it never gets boring to me. For the most part, students really, really, really like it -- they're terrified before it happens because it's SO public, but once they do it they say things like, "I actually learned that people are interested in what I have to say." How cool is that?

This will be our last CSW in the current location, the ballroom of McKenny Union. This is a *very* cool ballroom, just the kind that you might imagine if I say "student union constructed in the 20s kind of ballroom." Big, wood floors, arched ceiling... totally cool. Unfortunately, EMU is building a new student center (it's fortunate in some ways, I guess), and we'll be there next time. There are up sides - this semester's CSW, our big one (as opposed to the "small" fall CSW, with only 750 or so students), is spread across four interconnected rooms (ballroom and three others); in the new union we'll at least be in one room. But we'll lose the cool character of this room... ah, well. Progress. Sure.

I had an interesting conversation in the hallway with a colleague from the English Department who was on her way to a meeting during the set-up time for this event, too. She was talking about the need to involve students in assessment, essentially thinking about having assessment not be scary, but part of a project involving teaching and learning and conversations about same. This is all good - and an interesting counter to the NASCLGU stuff that I posted about earlier in the week.

PS - I change my settings. Thanks, everyone!

2006-04-09T10:56:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Jeff Rice and Joanna Howard for nicely telling me to change the settings so that non blogger.com members can post comments - and for welcoming me to the blogosphere! Settings are changed. Cool that people are reading! (I feel like my students!)

more on the NALUSCG survey

2006-04-09T06:29:00.000-07:00

The NALUSCG survey is, as feared, pretty terrible. It's terrible on several levels, actually. In terms of methodology, it's quite poorly constructed. In terms of what it's designed to elicit, it's also pretty terrible. It leads with this:

Good writing can have a number of different characteristics. In your personal view, how important are the characteristics listed below?
Only characteristics listed:
Accuracy, clarity, conciseness, scientific precision, visual appeal, logic, well documented and supported, solid spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

Not there: complexity of analysis, reflection, relevance to the writer and audience... I could go on.

The next question asks, "In your experience, approximately what proportion of current students possess the skills checked as "important" or "extremely important" above?"

Another question: "Compared to students ten years ago, how would you characterize the difference in writing skills of undergraduate students?" (Possible responses, from left[dominant] to right: Much poorer, Poorer, Better, Much Better.

Those of us in composition know what's likely to come out of a survey like this - we hear the "aren't you aghast that your students don't know anything?" (or some variation) non-question pretty frequently. I could go on, too, about what's not included in the survey... a whole host of things. The real problem, though, is that the questions that are listed here are just flat-out wrong. We don't talk about the "characteristics that good writing has"; we talk about the strategies that good writers bring to writing (or rhetorical situations) that help them to produce good writing. But I'm guessing that the NALUSCG didn't consult a lot of compositionists/rhetoricians when they built their survey. And that's leaving the methodological issues here aside.

Fortunately, CCCC has come up with a strategy to work with this ... more on that as it unfolds!

On a related note, I've just come from the Jewish Cultural Society, where I am a member, and where today there was a talk (or a schmooze, as we call them) on dealing with stress. I wasn't in the schmooze because I was working on an assessment tool for our big First-Year Writing Program assessment that's coming up, but I heard about it when I was going to my 11:00 administrative meeting. Apparently the speaker's key suggestion to decreasing stress was to stop worrying about things over which you/one/I has/have no control. Sage wisdom. :-)

Act now!

2006-04-04T06:14:00.000-07:00

(I'm writing this post as if someone is reading it, though I may just be writing to myself... who knows?)

As some of you know - those of you who know me, anyway -- and who else would be reading this blog? -- I'm quite involved with the effort to affect public policy regarding writing and writers. Of course, this extends to education more generally. I do some of this through the WPA (that's Council of Writing Program Administrators) Network for Media Action, which provides WPA-authorized position statements, tips on writing for mainstream media, and more. (If you want to see that stuff you have to be a WPA member - if you're not, you can join right on the site.)

But yesterday I got the first ever (!) e-mail from NCTE (that's National Council of Teachers of English, the mother ship of professional organizations for those of us in English/Comp) SLATE, which is NCTE's public action arm, on the
Spellings Commission on Higher Ed. This is a nasty piece of work; one of the things - and a big, big thing - that constitutes the steam roller I mentioned in yesterday's post. The e-mail prompted three actions: writing to the commission, contacting senators to meet with them (as experts in higher ed), and/or attending the hearing (which is in Indianapolis, so I can't do that).

I'll paste the letter I wrote to the commission below. If anyone else is interested in writing, NCTE has some valuable resources:Action Alerts, tips on meeting with Senators/Congressfolk, and more. This is great material. Right now it's pretty deeply buried in NCTE's web site, but I hear they're working to change that.

Because I've spent far more of my morning on this than I intended, I'll say no more now. However, DO write to the Commission, to your Senator, to others about this - it's important that we make our voices heard on this!!

To the Commission:

As a college composition professor and director of a large first-year writing program, I am pleased to see that articulation between high schools and colleges is of interest to the Commission.

Through research and assessment, we know that good writers are able to adapt to a variety of audiences and purposes for writing. College writing classes help students to become good writers. In these classes, students learn to assess the expectations of the various audiences they encounter in school and in the workplace and to meet those expectations in their writing.

To ensure that students are prepared for such courses, high school classes also should involve students in studying purposes and audiences for writing.
Preparing for high stakes assessments that emphasize single purposes and audiences for writing do not achieve this kind of preparation.

Articulation can best be achieved, instead, through active, voluntary collaborations among teachers and administrators in high schools and colleges.
The federal government has a role to play in supporting partnership grants that fund the development of replicable model programs drawing on the skills and insights of educators, administrators, and those outside the education sector to design enriched curriculum, more meaningful assessments, and expanded out-of-school learning experiences that will fully prepare students for success in college and beyond.

Sincerely, (etc.)

Sea Change

2006-04-03T05:04:00.000-07:00

News today in Inside Higher Ed that the N'tnl Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges is considering developing their own accreditation system, one that would compare places to other places of a similar type. Of course, I've just read the quick IHE story on this, but it seems to me that it's an effort (and I'll hold off on levying any assessment of the effort - I certainly don't have enough information on that...) to deal with the ever looming question of how to assess. The Department of Ed has provoked lots of thinking about this, certainly, though from what I hear (from being at conferences and listening around my own campus) that thinking was going on... it's just not clear how productively, across the board. NCLB is clear evidence of what doesn't work; there are bunches of smart people trying to think about what does. I find the whole question both engaging (on one level) and terrifying (on another). It's clear that a sea change is in the works - anyone in higher ed who argues that things should stay the same, or be like they were 20 years ago, or any kind of argument about preserving, I think will be squashed as flat as the leader's nose in "Sleeper." But who/what are the engines driving the steam roller that's doing the squashing, and what can we do about it? (And who is we?) These are all questions, in fact, that I'm trying to tackle in this book of mine... and right now, I'm swimming in them.

I just finished reading Good to Great and Good to Great for the Social Sector, and before anyone starts laughing (if anyone is reading, in fact!), I thought they were quite interesting... GtG more for the methodology and the analysis - since I am sort of repulsed by, say, the success of Phillip Morris in a declining economy - but the method was quite interesting, and, again, so was the analysis. A couple of the points that Collins and his team make keep circling around - one is that good to great companies (/social sector agencies, which is closer to where we are in ed., certainly!) identify the things they do well and just keep at them (this is the "hedgehog concept,") and the other is that gtg companies (and I'm not sure if this came up in the discussion of agencies) focus on being successful despite systemic problems. Now, I'm not sure that one makes a lot of sense for my own purposes, but it's a thought. (And I will come back to the Inside Higher Ed story in a minute.) If one of our goals is to change conversations about writing/writers to affect public policy, how can we do that without changing the systemic problems? Or should we (and who is we?) focus on the hedgehog thing, instead? What are the things we do well? It's a strange way to think about a field (and not just a specific class). I am betting that NCTE is thinking about this - or a similar question - and will endeavor to learn more about this. To return to the IHE story, it seems like the Land Grant Universities and Colleges folks are *also* thinking about this, as well.

One more thing about that IHE story that is under my skin, and then diyenu for the day... they talk about developing metrics to measure outcomes. What kinds of metrics? Based in what kinds of paradigms of assessment? As a person whose work is based in a field where "growth" does not look linear, this concerns me.

2006-04-02T21:37:00.000-07:00

Having created BrownDogsBlog (named after our brown dogs, Maggie and Saffie), I am committing to actually write in it - regularly, not just a few times here and there. My intent is to use this to help process my very, very many ideas about all things, but primarily ideas connected with the book project that I'll start working on in earnest once the school year ends, and I actually can start working on said book project.

Frankly, I feel odd about this whole process. Why would anyone want to read my ideas about this process? What's the difference between keeping a blog and just writing a private journal-ish kind of thing? I've never been good at keeping journals - I think about a line in Keith Gilyard's book, _Voices of the Self_, that went something like: "Writing is like an old friend. I don't visit it often, but when I do I don't hesitate to put on it my heaviest burdens." (Keith's line is more eloquent, but that gets at the spirit of the thing). So - not only is this a sort of journal, but it's also quite public (or at least has the potential to be public, should anyone choose to read it.) Of course, all writing takes place within a context - even a journal - it's just that this one is more public. Still, it's good for me to practice the regular writing that I preach. We'll see.