Everybody wants to Own the Future

First, I was glad to see the mention of David Russell's Writing in the Academic Disciplines 1870-1990 and Robert Connors Rhetoric-Composition. I think one of the real challenges in the US is getting folks to understand the way things are is not the way things have always been, i.e., this is not their natural state.This is one of the reason I really enjoyed reading James A. Berlin (even if some may say 'hell! no!). We need to trace the development of out institutions, to see the ideological and material forces that shaped them.

I'm also interested in getting 'beyond' (whatever that means) the traditional research paper. My own ideas regarding this have to do with connecting writing assignments to students lives and concerns while developing a further role in the larger political community as a "stakeholder."

The place where Davis and Shadle break down for me is that they can't seem to remember how quickly the present becomes the past. Written in 2000, I would anticipate their article would foresee the shift away from not only Literature based composition course, but the new normal of when it comes to students working with multi-media sources.

SEG-WAY!

So, in my last entry, I wrote about the strong mentoring support I received while teaching at Robert Morris University in Pennsylvania. Commenting on student writing was certainly an area in which I received some great instruction. Most specifically from Dr. A J. Grant in his Pedagogy of Composition course. He was particularly keen to help me out as we’d both done undergrad at a time when correcting mechanics and slapping a grade on an assignment were the standard way of doing things.
There are three things I like to keep in mind when writing comments on student papers--some of which come out of spending a healthy amount time as a profession writer/editor and some of which come out of working with Dr. Grant and my own teaching experience.
One—More than anything, as a teacher you’re dealing with individuals, not a class, not an assignment, but an actual person who has put words on a pages and is looking to you for helpful feedback. This is one reason why I like my first assignment to be some sort of personal essay and to have conferences about three or four weeks into the semester. That way one can get ‘on the side’ of a student, see what’s actually going on in their process. (I like the decompression exercises for this reason) talk about the progress they’re making and where they need to make adjustments

Two – Be rhetorical in your comments. This comes straight out of the business world. If you write a boring article or an ad campaign that doesn’t focus on what will drive your audience. No one, but no one, will give a damn if the mechanics are perfect. If, other hand, one hits all the right notes in a piece but the mechanics are sloppy….well, that’s why the good lord invented copy editors.

Three—Pat, Pat….SLAP. This is straight up PR 101. Working with C Level executives, you learn quickly they’re mostly (like the rest of us, but more so) only listen when people are saying good things about them. So, delivering criticism has to be done after two positive comments. In student writing, if a paper is really off-putting I write all the negative stuff on it first and then put in a pile. Then I go back over it and insert positive feedback.

mentorship/schemtorship

While I certainly agree that mentoring is of great import, I’m not sure that women or persons of color new to the academy have the most difficult time finding a mentor. These groups have made significant gains in the academy over the last twenty years. Where I think the real problem lies is social class. People from working class backgrounds of any race or gender are going to have a tougher time. A book I’ve heard does a great job of talking about this is Working-class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory by Tukarczyk and Fay.

Not that my own experience is exactly a scientific study, but I’ve seen both the results of formal mentoring programs (at Pennsylvania State University at New Kensington) and informal ones (at Robert Morris University). The PSU program was extremely pro forma. The mentor assigned to me was selected because we were both in the same broad discipline. Although, a tenured full professor, she had never taught creative writing class (which was what I had been hired to teach) and also had a class in another building at the same time as my class. Near the end of the semester, I submitted a video tape for review. I got pro forma feedback and the meeting we were supposed to have never happened.

The experience I had at Robert Morris University was outstanding. There, the chair of the English Department, A Distinguished Professor of English and an associate professor all took me other their wing in one way or another providing guidance and instruction as well as assignment sheets, grading rubric and tips for how to become a better instructor. Their doors were always open to me.

I also received a great deal of support from my fellow adjunct faculty my first year—which I tried to pay back my second year to some degree. I think one thing the Mentor Web article doesn’t acknowledge is the broad array of backgrounds of students in doctoral programs now due the recession and the collapse of the publishing industry. It’s not uncommon to have doctoral candidates being taught by people who have significantly less life and professional experience than they do. So what I think might be helpful is a mentoring program designed to help people with the transition from non-academic careers in addition to ones geared toward traditional graduate students.

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does anyone know how to set the access for this so it can only be read by the class