Focuses on the kind of assessment that takes place within a classroom context, and therefore looks at assessing, grading, or testing writing, since when educators talk about classroom assessment they talk of grades and tests, at times using all three terms interchangeably. Hopes to draw educators into new conversations about assessment and the teaching of writing.

s Kathleen Yancey points out in her history of writing assessment, evaluation in some form or another has been an important part of college writing courses for over fifty years (“Looking”). Yancey’s history recognizes the often conflicted nature of assessment for the teaching of writing. Although most writing teachers recognize the importance and necessity of regular assessment, they are also rightly concerned about the adverse effects assessment can have on their classrooms and students. This essay focuses on the kind of assessment (I use the words assessment and evaluation interchangeably, distinguishing both from either testing or grading) that takes place within a classroom context, and therefore looks at assessing, grading, or testing writing, since when we talk about classroom assessment we talk of grades and tests, at times using all three terms interchangeably. This slippage of assessment, grading, and testing as interchangeable provides a discourse about assessment that is often critical and unexamined. The result of these strong connections among grading, testing, and assessing writing is that any possible connection between the teaching and the evaluating of student writing is seldom questioned or discussed. This has led us as a profession to believe that assessing student writing somehow interferes with our ability to teach it. There are of course some notable exceptions. For example, Edward M. White’s germinal text is called Teaching and Assessing Writing, and he includes the ways in which formal assessments such as holistic scoring can benefit classroom practice; but even White divides assessment and teaching into separate entities that can affect each other. Certainly portfolios have been constructed by some (Elbow, “Foreword”;

Research Article| October 01 2002 Critical Work in First-Year Composition: Computers, Pedagogy, and Research Barbara B. Duffelmeyer Barbara B. Duffelmeyer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2002) 2 (3): 357–374. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2-3-357 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Barbara B. Duffelmeyer; Critical Work in First-Year Composition: Computers, Pedagogy, and Research. Pedagogy 1 October 2002; 2 (3): 357–374. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2-3-357 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2002 Duke University Press2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Composition teachers can obtain a better understanding of the challenges facing ESL students by writing in their own second language and reflecting on the experience.

In this article, we identify in the formation of U.S. college composition courses a tacit policy of English monolingualism based on a chain of reifications of languages and social identity. We show this policy continuing in assumptions underlying arguments for and against English Only legislation and basic writers. And we call for an internationalist perspective on written English in relation to other languages and the dynamics of globalization.

The authors argue that writing-intensive service-learning courses extend the lessons of first-year composition courses by teaching students how to understand and negotiate differences between the discourses of the academy and those of community-based organizations. While first-year writing courses lead students through successive approximations of a generalized academic discourse in the relative safety of the composition classroom, service-learning courses create conditions in which students must confront clashing discourses in action. This article present s vignettes of three different courses, one of which intentionally tapped into the discourse tensions the students faced and the other two of which encountered these tensions as impediments to successful teaching problems that could be overcome in future versions of the courses. The challenge of negotiating competing discourses will inevitably be part of any service-learning course that involves extensive writing, the authors conclude; hence this issue should be addressed explicitly in readings, class discussions, and student papers. When addressed directly, the friction between discourses can become a teachable space where teachers can help students explore options for addressing dissonance, and so provide everyone involved with an opportunity for transformation.

Examination of the Compass Learning Community shows that service-learning, when integrated into first-year learning communities, expands each student s ability to determine a college major in an informed manner. The combination of a first-year writing course linked with an academic course in career discovery provided students with a variety of opportunities for experiential learning about ways of understanding work as well as structured opportunities to reflect on their experiences. Students were enabled to think critically about their strengths, predispositions and values and to consider the implications of their self-discovery for college major and career choices. In the Compass program, service-learning provided the crucial experiential link in students critical assessment of their place in the college community and the community at large.

Notes that beyond the challenges of technology and time, online teaching also elicits unexpected introspection about the role as instructors, the changing relationships with colleagues, and the evolving perceptions about the students. Outlines five achievements and challenges associated with online first-year composition.

Addresses the climate of disappointment that characterizes English studies generally and composition studies--particularly writing program administration (WPA). Considers that the context of disappointment is shaped by a number of overlapping factors including: the widely perceived job market collapse in the humanities; the national abuse of adjunct teachers of first-year writing courses; and the general devaluation of the humanities.

In this examination of Mexican-American bilingual college writers, it is argued that implicit language ideologies, common misconceptions about bidialectalism/bilingualism, and the classroom attitudinal domain subvert the success of ethnolinguistic minority students. The author designed and conducted a randomized language attitude survey (N = 195) of 1st-year composition students on the assumption that language attitudes, reflective of the social/ethnic/linguistic polarization of south Texas, exist inside the English classroom. Findings correlate the multiple ethnolinguistic identities of this student population with language myth adherence. Results reveal the tendency among college writers for subscription to various language myths: dialect misconception, English bias, language purity myth, literacy myth, misconception of oral performance.

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Presents and discusses a study of 129 first-year composition students that identifies both their expectations and frustrations. Focuses on how such results demonstrate students’ ambivalence about classes and educators as well as their ability to function as effective writers.

Argues that students are more motivated and develop more effective skills if challenged with assignments that ask for the depth of thinking required of academic disciplines and careers. Encourages composition teachers to experiment with assignments that challenge assumptions about first-year students’ capabilities.

Shows how an editing assignment emphasizing punctuation can help students in a first-year writing class discover new ideas and perspectives as part of the revision process. Considers a class that experimented with editing punctuation for a dual purpose--as a revision heuristic as well as for correctness. Reconsiders editing and revision assignments to take better advantage of editing’s generative powers.

This study examines composition at public Midwestern normal schools, the teacher training institutions of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It argues that the unique social environment, educational aims, and intellectual traditions of the normal school gave rise to attitudes about composition theory, methods, teachers, and students that are much more compatible with composition’s contemporary ethic than those associated with the elite Eastern colleges where the origins of composition have most often been studied.

Describes the experiences of the author as she tries to transfigure her students enrolled in freshman writing and college preparatory writing classes at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon (located in the “dry side” of the state). Addresses students' racism, homophobia, and distrust of their own skills in writing.

A Group of Their Own: College Writing Courses and American Women Writers, 1880–1940, by Katherine H. Adams; Everyone Can Write: Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing, by Peter Elbow; Teaching Composition as a Social Process, by Bruce McComiskey.

Shafer recalls the process he and his colleagues in a community college writing program experienced in setting out to define their writing program and the theoretical framework upon which it was based. He reviews the literature that led the department to adopt a more process oriented, student centered curriculum.

early Methodism John Wesley created an extracurricular site of literacy and rhetoric that empowered women and the working classes to read, write, and speak in public. Wesley's method of literacy in community not only transformed religious life in Britain but also redefined the intersections of education, class, and gender. an article based on her 1993 CCCC Chair's address, Anne Ruggles Gere critiqued the field of composition: In concentrating upon establishing our position within the academy, we have neglected to recount the history of composition in other contexts; we have neglected composition's extracurriculum (79). Influenced by Shirley Brice Heath's study of community literacy practices, Glenda Hull's work on workplace literacy, Patricia Bizzell's concept of multiple discourse communities, and others, Gere examined the cultural work and literacy practices of writing groups outside the academy, focusing particularly on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American clubwomen, both white and African American. Gere urged us not only to expand our field's history to

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Considers the wide variation of first-year composition programs and if they do indeed vary so widely. Considers what the programs have in common. Asks if it would be possible to articulate a general curricular framework for first-year composition, regardless of institutional home, student demographics, and instructor characteristics. Presents a list of outcomes approved by the Council of Writing Program Administrators.

he call for improved educational assessment, and specifically the assessment of writing programs, has become louder and more urgent in the past decade. I want here to explore the place of faculty and faculty values in the process of assessing the work of higher education. How can we find better ways to put the intellectual work of faculty and students at the center of our educational concerns and, as a consequence, at the center of assessment models? A focus on first-year writing courses seems to me to be especially fruitful in responding to these questions. A university education is the work faculty and students do together, work pursued closely and undertaken carefully over time. This being the case, the first-year writing course (often the only course required of all students at a college or university) can clarify in crucial ways the primary place of intellectual work-of study and thought-in our understanding of the meaning and purposes of the university. Such a clarification can thereby help to resist the commodification of education and the corporatization of its institutions. As I have argued elsewhere,1 the first-year course should not be foundational to but rather be organic with the rest of the curriculum; it should not ground but enact the intellectual work of the university; it should not anticipate but begin the students' education. Language that conceptualizes the first-year course in terms of foundation, preparation, and anticipation narrativizes and scaffolds this course in order to empty it out: the meaning of the course is elsewhere. Its outcomes, not its work, give it its value.

Kath leen Blak e Ya nce y is Pearce Professor of English at Clemson University, where she directs the Roy and Marnie Pearce Center for Professional Communication and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing, rhetoric, and professional communication. Editor or author of six books and numerous articles and chapters, she chairs the College Section of NCTE and is vice-president of WPA. Her current interests include reflection as a means of enhancing learning; the design and uses of electronic portfolios; and ways of assessing digital texts.

Notes that teaching composition in a technical college presents a number of challenges. Considers how employers are calling for the hands-on training to be combined with more communication and critical thinking skills so that employees have a broader education that allows them to switch speeds or tasks. Describes activities and course components for technical college writing instruction.

Notes that finding a way to integrate grading and responding in a manner that promotes learning through revision is one major challenge for composition instructors. Argues that instructors must find a way to shape their classrooms shifting the emphasis from “getting it right the first time,” to learning to see writing as an activity that evolves and improves through revision.

Notes how early junior college compositionists sought to socialize a largely working-class student body into a middle-class sensibility. Argues that educators must make time to create historical narratives of two-year colleges as a valuable precursor to fighting for institutional reforms within institutions. Analyzes the manner that curriculum builders in the 1920s and 1930s constructed first-year writing courses at junior colleges.

This essay explores the many benefits of adding a community-based writing component to the first year composition course. It looks closely at the self-selected projects of 25 freshmen at a large suburban university to show how service-learning creates a context in which students can gain greater control over their own literacy and learn more about self and others.

Describes a class discussion in the author’s first-year composition class at a New York City community college, after students read a volume of Sappho’s poetry. Discusses issues of reading comprehension, poetry, gender-preference prejudice, and how they were all set straight by one student from Brooklyn.

Describes an AIDS-centered curriculum for a composition class in a New York City community college. Describes selecting a text, assignments, attending a conference, guest speakers, and the research paper. Notes that the subject of AIDS not only provokes reflective writing and much class discussion but also compels writers to express and sometimes change profound ideas about living and dying.

Describes the design of a standard first-year composition class in which the author used online discussion forums. Discusses how these design choices helped create a dynamic community of readers, writers, and learners in a writing classroom. Discusses pedagogical goals, and course design. Discusses several reasons why this approach works so well, and offers some cautionary notes.

Describes a “distant service learning” unit in a first-year composition course in which students wrote for a nonprofit organization in the classroom. Discusses program activities in relation to the first-year composition curriculum, program activities and the nonprofit organization, classroom implementation and assessment (including scoring guide criteria), and assessing student impact and impact on the nonprofit organization.

I argue that we need to acknowledge how the material interests of part-time and adjunct teachers, graduate assistants, tenure-stream faculty, and administrators can come into conflict in composition in order to negotiate fairly among them. I then call on bosses and workers in composition to form a new class consciousness centered on the issue of good teaching for fair pay. I discuss how the culture of academic professionalism militates against such a consciousness, and I propose three ways to forge a more collective view of our work: involving faculty at all ranks in teaching the first-year course, devising alternatives to tenure as a form of job security, and pressing for more direct control over staffing and curricula.

Advocates of brain-based learning have argued that instructional methods, to be successful, must be based on an understanding of how the brain processes information. In the past most descriptions of neurocognitive function were largely speculative, relying on theoretical constructions of how we believed the brain to work. Recent advances in functional imaging—Positron Emission Tomography and Magnetic Resonance Imaging—have, however, opened the brain to empirical study. This article will consider the potential importance of brain study for composition instruction, briefly describe functional imaging techniques, and review the findings of recent brain-mapping studies investigating the neurocognitive systems involved in language function. In short, understanding how language systems are organized in the brain represents the first step in our attempts to create brain-compatible instructional methods in the composition classroom. Following a review of the recent literature, the article will consider the possible implications of this information for pedagogical practice.

This investigation sought normative longitudinal change in student writing during college. It used a random sample of students (N= 64), each of whom had produced essays at two points in their undergraduate careers, matriculation and junior year. Measures were writing features showing undergraduate change toward competent, working-world performance. From a principal-components factoring of variables used in a previous study, nine measures were selected as good representatives of nine factors—factors of independent and bound ideas, idea elaboration and substantiation, local cohesion, establishment of logical boundaries, free modification, fluency, and vocabulary. When applied to the 1st-year and junior-year writing, eight of the nine measures, including a holistic rating, recorded statistically significant change, all in the direction of workplace performance. Directions for further research are discussed.

This essay describes a series of assignments that I have used in Writing and Social Issues, a first-year writing course that features service-learning. These assignments should prove useful to those interested in the relationship between community-based writing instruction and first-year courses that focus on the student’s transition from high school to college.

Offers 4 brief descriptions from college writing teachers of activities they use successfully. Describes using a “round robin” process for group writing and revision; addressing stylistic and grammatical issues by using anonymous student writing; “showing” versus “telling” words; and using film to model “larger” meaning in personal narrative.

The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680–1750 by James A. Herrick. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997; 245 pp. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays by Sharon Crowley. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1998. 306 pp. Four recent studies of rhetoric in Socrates and Plato The Religion of Socrates. Mark McPheran. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. 353 pp., (paperback, 1999). Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form. Charles H. Kahn. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 431 pp., (paperback, 1998). Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy. Andrea Wilson Nightingale. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 222 pp. The Paradox of Political Philosophy: Socrates’ Philosophic Trial. Jacob Howland. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998 (hardcover & paperback). 342 pp.

This study addressed the question, “How consistently do students perform on holistically scored writing assignments?” Instructors from 13 introductory writing classes at two colleges were asked to provide essay sets written by their students in response to the three to five most important writing assignments in their classes. In all, 796 essays were collected from 241 students. The study drew on a pool of 15 experienced judges to evaluate the essays. Each essay set was scored holistically and independently by 6 of the judges who either ranked or graded the essays in the set. All papers written by a particular student were scored by the same judges. Pairwise correlations of the scores assigned to each essay set were computed for each judge and then averaged across judges. The average of these correlations was 0.16, indicating very low consistency of holistically scored student performance from essay to essay. This result suggests that drawing conclusions from one or even a few writing samples is problematic.

Like many in our field, I rose up “through the ranks” to my present position as a director of the Writing Center at a small, private college of pharmacy and health sciences. My career path started while I was pursuing an M.A. in English, where I tutored in the university’s Writing Center. Then, when I was back in school to complete a doctorate in education, I once again was given the opportunity to tutor in the university’s Writing Center, and, eventually, to study that Center as the subject of my dissertation. I graduated in the spring of 1996, and by the fall of that year I was hired by my current college to start its Writing Center. Four years later, I am a faculty member in the School of Arts and Sciences and hold administrative responsibility for the entire writing program, as well as for a new initiative on first-year student experience. What a smooth path that narrative above seems to indicate, a path of increasing professional opportunities, from “novice” to “expert,” from tutor to director, from student to faculty member, a “transformation” of sorts that is easily the script that we would write for many in our field. But here is another way of telling that story: My first writing center job came during my second semester of pursuing an M.A. in English/Creative Writing and a high school teaching credential. I would have preferred to be a TA and teach composition in the classroom, but most of my fellow graduate students were experienced teachers and gained the coveted TA positions. Instead, I tutored in the university’s Writing Center for $7 per hour, a rate that did not change in the three years that I worked there. I worked primarily with basic writing students, who came to the Writing Center as a course requirement and who were made to sift through a grammar/usage workbook, completing exercises on modals and subject/verb agreement and nouns and antecedents (which still happens, though now these exercises are computer Sherwood, Steve. “How to Survive the Hard Times.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 17.10 (1993): 4-8.

A s a field of professional inquiry intertwined with the practice and teaching of its own subject, composition studies has enjoyed the steady pace of its own recent evolution.Few composition scholars twenty years ago would have imagined the rate at which the field is now developing, exploding beyond its boundaries, creating new alliances, and locating new sites for inquiry and knowledge production.These current transformations owe in part to the inevitable burgeoning of a theoretically interdisciplinary field with a strong orientation toward self-reflection.They also owe to unprecedented changes underway in higher education, changes pressured by shifts in the politics and economics of university administration, the advent of new technologies, population changes that affect student demographics, and the creation of alternative structures and contexts for teaching and learning.Composition, in seeking a disciplinary identity, is questioning the ways it creates and mediates knowledge and the ways in which that knowledge informs and is informed by various contexts for research and practice.This collection focuses on the ways in which composition reconsiders established dichotomies, examines new connections among areas of inquiry, and suggests avenues for inquiry that have transformative consequences for the sites of theory, research, and teaching.When we first proposed this volume of essays, we sought submissions that reconsidered the relationship among theory, research and practice, expecting that our focus would primarily be on the changing face of composition research.Our open call and invitation to individual scholars, however, resulted in very few reports of research studies, but rather in contributions that reflect the extent to which the theory/research/practice relationship now occupies our disciplinary thinking.Since the publication of Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (1987), the past decade has seen attention to research methodology largely displaced by conflict between theory and practice.This conflict, still rooted, one might argue, in the desire for a unified theory, often centers on the extent to which any theory employed by compositionists must grow, if not from research, then from practice, or at least edgment of "what is contradictory, and perhaps unknowable" (9).Many of the authors in this volume (Rose and Lauer; Chiang; Grimm, et al.; Okawa) build into their essays acknowledgement of their positions as scholars and researchers and examine their "findings" as cultural and ideological products.At that same time, some of them are quick to point out the limits and consequences of new theories and methodologies for composition as a disciplinary community (Seitz; MacDonald; Neff; Ray and Barton).Increasingly, compositionists have more confidence in the recognition that teaching makes knowledge, and that practice, overdetermined as it is, continually calls into question the traditional purpose of theory-to explain unaccounted-for phenomena and solve new problems.Lore, as North distinguishes it from traditional disciplinary knowledge production, can, Harkin argues, be thought of as postdisciplinary theory, because it allows for practitioners' often contradictory attempts to solve writing problems with more than one cause, rather than using theory in the traditional way to contain situations (134).Beth Daniell has argued that while composition theories may lack the authority to dictate pedagogy, as rhetoric, they are what persuade us to teach writing in the ways that we do (130).At the same time that theories may contain the discipline by "serving the interests of . . .groups within that discipline" (131), they are what enable us, she says, to "create a community in which we can figure out what we, individually and collectively, believe about our work" (135).In that rhetorical and political sense, theory is practice.But, as several of the authors in this volume (Ferry; Vandenberg; Howard) ask, whose "work" and whose interests define us and remain at the center of composition as a discipline?Can theory, research, and practice in ever new relationships intersect and hold an expanding community together or drive it apart into separate communities whose power and authority may be in jeopardy?Composition's calling into question its knowledge comes at a time when the authority of that expert knowledge may be at risk.In the wake of shrinking graduate programs and the responsibility-centered-management of academic departments in the new corporate universities, the literature components of some English departments are beginning to reclaim an expertise in the teaching of writing or, in some instances, to efface that expertise, deeming it no longer necessary, politically appropriate, or cost-effective.Much composition scholarship in fact contributes to this withering away of the more public conception of composition.Our growing understanding of complex context-specific literacy practices runs counter to institutional conditions that assume composition is an essential set of transparent skills to be conveyed one-time-only to first year students by exploited instructors.If retooled writing courses do result from the disciplinary boundary crossing of compositionists into deconstruction, feminist, multicultural, and cultural studies, what in the experiences of teachers and students justifies or interrogates these theories in practice?How does interdisciplinary inquiry expand avenues and change how and what we research and teach?What locates theorists, courses, teachers, and programs that might grow from this research within "composition"?Several of the authors in this volume locate their concerns about composition's "identity crisis" in a disjuncture between theory and pedagogy, whether questioning composition's attempts to achieve more disciplinary status (Ferry; Vandenberg; Howard) or its failure to focus more attention on knowledgebuilding inside the field (MacDonald; Neff).