The challenge associated with first-year writing environments mirrors that associated with many other educational disciplines: the difficulty of seeing beyond the single class. Longitudinal studies of students' writing development across four years of college are relatively rare, and as a result comp/rhet specialists and university faculty and administrators indulge in extensive speculation based on extrapolations from extremely limited samples. Usually, the sample class size is one. Particularly useful in this context, therefore, is the work of Lee Ann Carroll (2002) whose research tracks the writing development of a group of students across their college careers [1]. There are some pretty obvious methodological problems with Carroll's study, but these reflect not so much upon her research design as the difficulty of doing such work in the first place [2.] Nevertheless, Carroll's results are suggestive and thought-provoking; taken in their best light they suggest not so much definitive findings concerning the nature of an existing writing program, but intriguing possibilities for designing new programs. And one of the most striking insights that runs throughout her account of students' reflection on their writing practice is the degree to which they seem to inhabit a very different learning environment than the one that is explicitly invoked by the design philosophy behind their courses. And the world they inhabit is one with an approach to learning that seems to mirror some of the principles incorporated into an effectively designed electronic game [3.]
Carroll observes that “In students’ own words, they became better at figuring out “what the professor wants.” These successful students learned to accommodate the often unarticulated expectations of their professor readers, to imitate disciplinary discourse, and, as juniors and seniors, to write in forms more diverse and complex than those they could produce when they entered college” (p. 23). In Carroll's study, the question “what does the teacher want?” that so many of us tend to treat as (on a good day) naive, and (most of the time) as annoying evidence of a lazy disposition, is in fact an incredibly productive one for the students to be asking. It demonstrates an awareness on their part, based on considerable experience with idiosyncratic writing demands from a wider sample of teachers than we ourselves typically encounter, that all writing is situational and is usually produced in response to specific demands. With a little reflection, we understand this to be true for our own writing also [4].
Carroll argues that the kinds of writing experiences students tend to find valuable aren’t necessarily those that immediately translate into other kinds of writing, or mark a stage of mastery, but ones where they themselves feel that they have achieved something significant in their writing development. Carroll also offers the useful reminder that learning is not reducible simply to what is demonstrated (or appears to us to be demonstrated) in the text:
Professors tend to evaluate student papers as text and as representative of what students know or what they have learned in a course and as representative of their ability as writers. In order to justify grades, teachers assess what appears on the page, though, of course, like all readers, they also read into the text what they expect to find there. Yet, students, in our study repeatedly discussed papers that in the student's own assessment were not great writing but did represent significant learning. (p. 57)
Most students in Carroll's study were often barely able to remember their first-year writing courses by the time they graduated, and when they did remember them and value the courses, it was for “rather homely literacy skills such as using sources effectively, improving style, writing for an audience, and learning to organize and develop a complex analysis. . .” (p. 72). The tiny percentage of their college time that students spend in such writing courses also makes all the claims made for composition as a site for teaching critical literacy and social consciousness more than a little problematic [5].
One surprising finding for Carroll was that the value students found in their first-year writing courses did not square with the design emphasis of those courses:
students described learning in their composition courses a type of writing they found more personal, more creative, and unlike the writing in their academic majors, more suitable for a general audience. . . .Our composition courses supposedly emphasized analytical writing, not personal narrative, and assignments generally asked students to think critically about serious issues, often responding to readings or incorporating research, not simply, reporting personal opinion. We had hoped to create the kind of rich literacy environments that would challenge our students and teach a generalized form of academic writing that students could adapt for their work in other courses. But, from the perspective of our study students, this generalized form of academic writing, not tied to a specific discipline, still seemed to be lacking in content and more subjective than work in their majors” (pp. 75-76).
To the extent that Carroll's findings can be generalized (and, as I indicated above, there is reason to be cautious about this) it suggests that the explicit rationale for most first-year writing courses (to teach a "generalized form of academic writing") and the belief on the part of writing teachers that at some level we are teaching skills that have a kind of objective, verifiable applicability to disciplinary discourses is a fig-leaf.
What is at stake in this discussion therefore is, in part, the complexities of the "transferable skills" problem that bedevils so many programs of study but which acquires a new urgency for writing teachers, I would argue, precisely because of our assigned role to provide students with a foundational form of knowledge. Alber Morgan et al. (2007), for example, relying heavily upon the work of Don Baer, point out that the likelihood that students will be able to generalize the skills they have learned is slim unless the course is organized to teach students how to generalize [6].
What is less disputable is Carroll's argument that students have their own learning agendas, especially given the many demands on their time. They are, she notes, "strategic" in their literacy: “they are as literate as they need to be to accomplish their own goals, including earning acceptable grades. In our study, students said they liked comments from teachers on their writing, and they usually read them. . . .But grades, once again, functioned as important signals to students and influenced their response to comments. Students weighed the cost of spending time on a paper against the likely benefit of a better grade” (p. 96). However detailed the comments on a draft, for example, if they student doesn’t see much benefit in revising the paper for a (probably minor) grade increase then they probably won’t.
In observing that “the overall picture of student learning can seem rushed and fragmented” Carroll observes, a little ironically, that because of this “it can seem that students are getting a kind of workplace training, a workplace, even in academia, where the ability to juggle many different tasks under time constraints is highly valued. Far from being an ivory tower of leisurely contemplation, college continues to sort students for future jobs, putting special value on time management” (p. 113). While complaints about the supposedly recent shift of colleges away from the ideal of a liberal education and toward vocational training are legion, colleges have for many years been tightly integrated into the capitalist labor market, functioning as either a pre-professional filtering program or, more commonly, extending the function of high schools as a holding pen for a reserve army of labor [7]. In this regard, if my larger attempt in this webtext to draw parallels between the worlds of writing course design and game design seems far fetched, it is worth noting that when electronic games are looked at as vehicles for learning by the business community (which is on very rare occasions), it is often in just this kind of reductive vocational light: people don't get much from the games themselves, we are told, but the experience of playing them equips people nicely for participation in the business world [8, 9].
To put an admittedly tendentious spin on Carroll's findings we could say that students are getting something out of our first-year writing classes despite our best efforts; they are using some very specific learning strategies to cobble together the knowledge and skills they need to get by in those of their classes that employ writing:
- students approach our classes as a complex time-management problem; what often looks to our eyes as time mismanaged may in fact simply reflect the different value that they place on our classes;
- more specifically, students treat the work in our classes according to a cost-benefit model: how much time and effort will I need to spend on this based on the perceived value of the reward?
- when students do place a value on our classes, they emphasize precisely those things that we are likely to see as "low-level." For students, however, these skills represent a useful starter set on which they can build and which are, moreover, reasonably transferable across the various domains in which they will find themselves working;
- the educational experience as a whole is understood, precisely, not as a whole, but rather as a series of largely disconnected tasks taking place in separate realms, each task requiring its own particular set of solutions that will only partially take advantage of what the student already knows. The whole is held together by the tenuous coincidence of a flimsy official narrative and the student's own desires and goals.
With only slight modifications, these facets of students' educational experience could describe the experience of participating in a large online role-playing game.
Indeed, were college organized along the lines of a well-designed MMORPG, students would quest ceaselessly, level up, and emerge as pretty accomplished players in their respective fields. However, Carroll's research suggests that what students typically experience is an encounter with (at best) a badly designed game or (at worst) a game that is (paradoxically) not even designed to work as a game. They encounter teachers as strange creatures who seem to have studied for years to become capable game developers. . ..but have, absurdly, emerged at the end of that process seemingly unable to design a halfway decent game. To top it all off these designers keep insisting that the academic game is in fact some other kind of game than students' everyday experience tells them it is.
For many students the writing class is, therefore, a place of frustration and bewilderment, or will become so in retrospect as they encounter vastly different disciplinary expectations in other classes which are presented as universal rules. At best they will come to see their introductory writing classes as an odd, hopefully interesting aberration. More commonly, if (in most cases it is when) the techniques and strategies we teach receive little reinforcement in other classes, they will see their first-year writing experience as its own highly localized and context-specific set of practices that they will rarely if ever use.
What could we be achieving if we teachers were adept at designing the kind of game that students in fact find themselves playing? I have been walking the streets of Pedagogia here, proclaiming loudly that the answer is to embrace the idea of the classroom as a space of simulation. The more salient question, however, is why there is such obvious discomfort with the notion of simulation? [10]
1. Carroll, L. A. (2002). Rehearsing new roles: How students develop as writers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
2. These include a sample size that was initially very small (and shrank still further over the course of length of the study), the fact that students were compensated for developing their portfolios and the rather select nature of the student body.
3. These core design principles can be explored by journeying to the distant city of Arpeggia.
4. The reports we must write, the feedback we must give; sure, our research is self-chosen. . .until we realize we must keep publishing or else. The fact that we so often treat the "what do you want" question from students so impatiently may well indicate that for all the emphasis upon audience analysis and response on the part of many rhetoricians, we are still saddled with what is at core the expressivist fantasy: that all writing issues from a deep, spiritual motivation to say something, rather than because a writer has been required to say something.
5. "While composition teachers can produce student papers and evaluations that show how students change in their thinking as well as their writing over the course of a semester, by the time students are seniors, these changes in consciousness are subsumed by the much larger experience of having lived four years in a more diverse environment and being initiated into specific academic disciplines. Students’ worldviews certainly change over four years but a composition course is just one small point of transition that may or may not reinforce students’ previous beliefs or contribute to changing them” (Carroll, 2002, p. 72).
6. Alber-Morgan, S. R., Hessler, T. & Konrad, M. (2007). Teaching writing for keeps. Education and Treatment of Children 30 (3), 107-28.
7. See Watkins, E. (1989) Work time: English departments and the circulation of cultural value. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
8. See Beck, J. C. & Wade, M. (2006). The kids are alright: How the gamer generation is changing the workplace. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
9. Gee helps to define the most recent shift that has taken place. He notes that there is a great irony in the fact that when the US economy was seen as struggling, especially in the face of competition from Asia, classes that took a more open-ended approach to learning were all the rage. But then once US economic ascendancy had been assured, policy-makers began to lambaste these same education programs. “What happened, in my view, is that policymakers began to see that the “new capitalism” was not going to make of every worker a “knowledge worker,” as had previously been thought. Rather, the new global high-tech economy called for lots of service workers in addition to lots of knowledge workers. The service workers needed good communication skills and a willingness to be cooperative and pliant but often did not need much sophisticated technical or specialist knowledge” (p. 193).
10. If you haven't already done so, now might be a good time to take a trip to Simulata. It is lovely this time of year. Or at least it pretends to be so.
Pack Up and Move to a New City