Admittedly, I am an improvisational teacher (probably due to my background in theatre). So when I’m confronted with a room full of those blank stares and raised eyebrows that we all know so well, I can usually shift gears or backtrack quickly enough to recover most of the class before losing them to Facebook. However, on this particular day it seemed that no matter what I tried – different angles, examples, lead-in questions – my class could not work through a rhetorical analysis of the articles I had assigned for homework. Personally, I think it was more than failing to grasp the rhetorical situation and use of appeals to logos, pathos, and ethos. Maybe they were just bored and un-invested. Perhaps they had failed to complete the assigned reading (despite the required wiki post). Regardless of the reason, the class session was quickly coming to a screeching halt, and I was all but ready to chalk the day up to a loss. In a last ditch effort, I put myself on the chopping block and asked students “what about this class… What about the way that I teach? That’s a communicative event, so we should be able to analyze that rhetorically.”

As soon as I said it, the hair stood up on the back of my neck. Why did I say that? Of course, I had nothing to worry about. It was February and most of the class was still too shy to comment in class without prompting, much less openly criticize their instructor and his rhetorical technique. After breathing a quick sigh of relief and cracking a joke about my “cosmic rhetorical powers” (the laughs broke the tension), I decided to plow through brainstorming the “obviously fictitious” case of my own rhetorical ineffectiveness. After a minute or so, I could see the genuine interest and surprise register on students’ faces. Despite my thick sarcasm, I was actually delivering an honest critique of my own teaching and expecting them to not only agree with the example, but to (respectfully) extend the criticism as they saw fit.

Now, I will be the first to admit that this particular improv session could have been disastrous. Rhetorically speaking, I was attacking my own ethos in front of a group that depended on it and encouraging their complicity to boot. However this example produced some immediate and interesting effects within the class. I’m not sure if it was the chance to “stick it” to the instructor, or the fact that I was bluntly critical of my own performance, but as I mentioned above, students were surprised at my gesture and quickly engaged in the class discussion. It became much easier for my students to make connections between the rhetorical techniques of my teaching and the effects they produced in my targeted (student) audience since they had a uniquely tangible example with which to work. Further, they were thoroughly invested in this activity (for obvious reasons) and worked hard to reason through the brainstorming session with positive results. In fact, several students who had yet to volunteer a comment in class were offering solid ideas without any extra prompting from me.

While reflecting on my first college teaching experience these past few weeks, I’ve come to realize that my improvised example was a crucial juncture in the development of the class. Practically speaking, it was easy to repurpose this idea for each of the major assignments in the course. My teaching practices and other general classroom business provided ample concrete examples for students to analyze in relation to the definition, evaluation, and proposal arguments. I needed only to hearken back to the initial critique, apply it to the specifics of the assignment, and students would generally make the necessary connections. Further, after demonstrating that I had indeed listened to (some of) the criticism by adapting my approach accordingly, the stakes involved in these sessions became increasingly clear. As a result, students invested more effort and thought into class activities, and more trust in my teaching and critical comments. Taking a cue from my own openness to criticism, students felt more at ease in offering their own ideas, which opened the class up and produced some interesting (and at times heated) conversations.

In essence, putting my own work on display established an atmosphere of mutual respect, self-criticism, and practical application of ideas that only ripened as the semester progressed. I have even had a handful of students ask for public critiques of their own drafts – something I never expected from English 1020 students. More importantly, this running example allowed me to continually steer the class towards sustained meta-discussions about class objectives, activities, and outcomes – a practice which arguably produced the most genuine learning experiences of the semester (a good thing too, since I lacked the foresight to build formal reflections into my syllabus). Ultimately, this less than ground breaking improvisation ended up being one of the best educational choices I made all semester. So next time you are searching for some relevant example to use in class, try a little good-natured self-deprecation. It certainly worked for me.

Chris Susak is a PhD candidate and GTA in the program who currently teaches 1020 and tutors in the Writing Center. He is also a member of the program’s Curriculum Committee.

It is a tautological truism that “we don’t know what we don’t know.” The corollary is that we, and our students, often don’t know the questions to ask to find out what we don’t know.

There are many aspects of college discourse which are new for students in freshmen or introductory classes. Many of the things that we do are mysterious. Other things should be mysterious but sometimes pass without notice if we don’t draw attention to them. For example, in one of my classes I was reviewing ways that you could identify the point in a paper when you started to summarize the plot rather than analyze the work. To emphasize my point, I said, “I know what happened in the play. You don’t need to tell me.” A student finally raised her hand and said, “So you don’t want a one paragraph synopsis of the plot?” Her experience had led her to believe that all English papers required a synopsis so that the teacher would know that you had understood (and read) the underlying text. Instead, I started with the assumption that the students had comprehended the text and that what they were supposed to demonstrate was the next step in the analytical process. I had not explicitly told them not to include a synopsis, however, so they made assumptions based on their prior experience. Discussing the requirements for the assignment led to one student recognizing that there was a disjunction between her expectations and mine. She could then ask a useful question to clarify.

What does this mean for us as instructors working with students at this stage in their career? We need to do more than ask questions of our students. We need to do more than employ pedagogical silence to allow the students to answer instead of answering our own questions in our impatience. We need to help them ask questions and either provide answers or help them find ways to answer their own questions. Ken Bain, in What the Best College Teachers Do, suggests that “the natural critical learning environment leaves students with a question” (103). The question that they’re left with is not a single specific question, but rather the open-ended sort of question that leads to further development. Questions like “What’s next,” “What else don’t we know,” “How else can we think about this,” represent the next stage for the students in their critical thinking. Getting them to the point where they not only can ask these questions is important. Helping them expect that there will be something more to explore after the answer has been given is crucial to their development. While there may be “correct” answers or “better” answers, college courses, particularly in the humanities but in other disciplines as well, cannot stop when one answer has been found. The first answer will usually be the foundation for further questions.

We as instructors can help our students to learn to do this if we listen for the places where there should be a question and draw our students’ attention to those spots if they don’t notice them.

Claudia Ross is a PhD candidate and GTA who researches Early Modern Literature and is currently teaching ENG 2200 (Shakespeare).

Dear WSU Teaching,
What can you do when you are behind on returning work, and you have students asking you every class when they will receive their grades? Is there anything more helpful than saying “soon,” or reminding them that you’ve put grading paper X on the back burner so they can get feedback on the much more relevant rough draft Y first?
- Tardy in Trenton

–To begin, I am going to step away from that moment in the classroom to tell you how I try to keep from experiencing it.

It takes time to figure out what works for you in terms of grading, but, after several years, I realized that I wasn’t good at balancing reading more than one big project at a time (who is?), so my schedule reflects this. I leave two weeks between collecting drafts and having final papers due. I take one week to read drafts (for three sections), which gives me a couple of days of leeway in case something takes longer than expected. I am also up front with my students about how long it takes me to work through them—about 15 minutes per draft. If I am honest with them about how long they should spend on an assignment, how they should manage their time between reading and writing, I can also let them know how reading and responding fits into my weekly calendar. I hope this cultivates some level of patience in them.

Another way to give them a little feedback on the draft so you can focus on grading, would be to respond to initial discovery drafts of paper Y with quick, framing questions so they can keep working and you can focus on grading paper X. Let’s say Paper X was due Monday night and you want a full draft of Paper Y the following Monday. Having an initial discovery draft due to the blog, say Wednesday (and yes, these days are totally arbitrary) gives you time Thursday to respond to blog posts with quick questions so they can keep working on Paper Y (with some feedback from you) and you can keep grading Paper X. This gives you time into the next week to finish paper X (while you let their drafts sit for an extra day or two), have more confidence in their drafts before you’ve read them, and stay on track. Giving in class feedback to discovery drafts can accomplish the same thing.

Honestly, though, buckle down and finish grading. If you have set a timeline for your students, set one for yourself as well. Like I said, be honest with yourself when you set up your schedule about what you can handle grading in a certain amount of time. If you think the schedule you’ve made at the beginning of the semester isn’t shaking out, revise it, discussing the reasons for your changes with students. (AJ)

–Dear Tardy in Trenton,
I think the most important thing is to avoid painting yourself into a corner and putting yourself in a position where you’re breaking multiple promises. In my experience, students don’t mind if you say that you’re running a bit behind. What’s bad is when you make a promise and then break it and then break it again. That’s annoying. I would also strongly advise against describing why you’re running behind or apologizing. As a tip, pick return dates not just based on your syllabus, but in consultation with your own calendar so you can avoid other deadlines and commitments. Finally, don’t try and convince yourself that you’re going to grade papers during The Walking Dead. You’re already infected. (TT)

Dear WSU Teaching,
Typically, I like to group “stronger” writers with “weaker” ones during peer review – this way I feel like weaker writers can get good feedback. However, I feel like I’m putting the stronger writers at a disadvantage. One particular “strong” writer in my class was dissatisfied with peer review because she felt like she wasn’t getting enough out of it. So, how do we solve the “strong writer/weak writer” dilemma in peer review?
- Conflicted in Clawson

–Dear Conflicted in Clawson,
One method I’ve used is to arrange groups of three to five writers of mixed ability in which the papers go around in a circle and are read by multiple readers. With this method, writers get feedback from multiple readers across the spectrum AND readers get to see feedback styles from the other reviewers. If you feel this adds too much time to your peer review sessions, consider reviewing just a section of the paper or assigning different parts of the paper to different group members. (TT)

–Dear Conflicted,
If you feel like you’re putting the stronger writer at a disadvantage, feel again: at best she’s getting a lesson in responding to shitty drafts, which could help her in the long run.

On the other hand, it sounds like the “experienced” writer is looking for criticism or affirmation on her own writing. So, what might a “struggling” writer, teach an “experienced” writer? How might training “struggling” writers to ask the right questions during peer review help revisionary purposes?

Or, you could mix it up a bit. Group by interest, or discipline, link “experienced” writers and “struggling” writers together (with some guidelines) and observe what happens. (LF)

Dear WSU Teaching,
What can I do to “spice up” a lecture? I feel like if I talk for longer than 20 minutes the students seem to fall asleep or get fidgety (which is understandable). Should I simply shorten my lectures, or find another way to engage students through lecture?
- Boring in Bloomfield Hills

–20 minutes is a good guideline. On days when there is a need to lecture for longer periods – especially earlier in the semester – I usually work in as much as four different types of interaction between the class, myself, and the screen. I have several lectures than run long, but as soon as I breach 15 minutes I’m either consciously (or sometimes intuitively) looking for ways to break it up, either soliciting questions (recently in Jeopardy style… thanks to R.C.), modeling examples of invention strategies at work or analytical tools, turning to video examples (often that offer short arguments, claims, or persuasive strategies that we can quickly analyze or respond to), or having them read (or re-read) a paragraph or two (sometimes while I quickly deconstruct it while they’re reading, highlighting segments or using Word’s comment boxes to point out features– which is something I’ve done more this year and which seems to bridge more explicit instructions with certain exercises quite well).

Also, I’m not afraid to start (rather than just end) with our legendary Moments of Zen just to focus attention and segue into a lecture. Colbert does this so often in my class that he now has distinct 1020 ethos by the end of most of my semesters – hopefully enhancing his appeal as a rhetor of sorts. My students know I love how exemplifies fallacies, the ways evaluations can be framed incorrectly (his response to Geraldo’s problem with hoodies), the uses of synecdoche as he connects parts to the whole in “The Word”, or the ways he finagles definitions of ‘marriage’ as ‘manrriage’ in his “Better Know a Lobby” segment.

So obviously humor is an important part of maintaining a suitable ‘spice’ in many of my classes. On the other hand, I muster (a sometime sickly amount of) enthusiasm for the seriousness of their written work by repeatedly connecting it to an evolving and general thinking ability that improves over the semester – pointing out more impressive writing skills, drafts and the potential therein. I got away from it this semester, but in the Fall I often started a class with student presentation of what was accomplished in recent exercises (allowing me to have a brief look between classes to comment on what worked well and to contextualize it in the course objectives). I would often suggest that everyone be ready to present at the beginning of next class, but then select only a couple groups to do so. I could use these to set up some of the more humdrum lectures focused on introducing the instructions for a project – noting that we’d already done some of the practice work in definitions, or in narrowing the scope of an evaluation. This works with debates too. (JG)

–Boring, Darling~
I applaud you for wanting to spice up your routine and engage your students! We all have the challenge of communicating a hefty amount of content in a limited amount of time, but who wants to pour energy into preparing a lecture that students are going to sleep through?

When I sit down to prepare for teaching a class, I first consider the rhetorical situation: who is my audience? Usually, it is a group of 18-19 year olds (read: attention spans slightly greater than gnats). Then, there is the weird and kind of cool thing that happens when they get grouped together in classes–each class has its own “personality.” So, depending on the personality of a given class, teachers can adjust for more or less lecture. Next, I consider my own teacher-ethos: the rapport I craft with each class serves as safe, healthy environment that nurtures open discussions, freely-asked questions (by students and myself), genial group-work and lots of laughter. I have been known to make fun of myself, crack jokes, sing, dance, and just this Monday, I quoted Mel Gibson’s final line from Braveheart–at full volume–to illustrate an important point about finals. Knowing and being comfortable with your own teacher-ethos helps tremendously in connecting with students and keeping them engaged. Also, I consider my purpose: what knowledge needs to be disseminated here? And–what are ways to accomplish that? Usually, there are many more options available to me than lecturing alone. I normally conceive of “class” as more of a workshop/discussion space, with chunks of explicit instruction mixed in as needed. When I do “lecture,” I call it a “mini-lesson” (via Nancie Atwell) and plan for discussions and activities that surround it and become built-in. Can I get ______ concept across through Socratic discussion? Using a video clip and a conversation about it? Through a series of strategic activities? I try to engage students with as many participatory elements as I can. That might mean pausing at every new idea to allow students to freewrite about it. I sometimes do a “pair and share,” an activity totally pilfered from ProfHacker, where I ask students to sit in silence for 1-2 minutes, thinking about an idea that’s just been presented. Then, they turn to a partner and for 2-3 minutes, share what it was they just thought. I might build some invention writing or a group activity into a mini-lesson, and then also have some “deliverables” that students must turn in to me at the end. Or, if there is no way around it and I must just speak at them, I always instruct them to pull out “something to write with and something to write on.” I then pause every so often at key ideas, and explicitly tell them to “write this down” or “if you take notes on nothing else, take notes on this!” and then wait while they do. Or, I might ask questions during the lecture that students need to respond to before I move on (being silent in these moments is a teacher’s big challenge! Counting in your head or watching the clock both help). Overall, I try to be transparent about why I’m asking them to think/write/share/listen to concepts, no matter what. Teaching, and learning, are collaborative activities. I do my part in the collaboration by preparing, honing my expertise, and strategically thinking through the rhetorical situation of each class. But I cannot neglect my students’ part in the collaboration, and I must honor that (which sometimes means plan for, wait for, give directions for…), and generally expect a level of participation from my students that is equal to my own. More often than not, students will rise to the level of our expectations. (NGV)

Dear WSU Teaching,
This is kind of specific, but how do you respond to an older student who feels that she is above the class and takes issue with the way the class is run? This student is not overtly rude or disrespectful but does talk down to classmates and the instructor at times, and it is evident that she does not want to participate in workshops and group work because she feels she is “far beyond” other students (and really, in this case, the student is more advanced than her peers). Specifically, this student provides good feedback fro students during the workshop, but in a condescending way,and often tries to separate herself from the class.
- Frustrated in Ferndale

–Dear Frustrated~
I can relate to your dilemma—it’s happened to me a time or three. In your case, there are a lot of positive things happening: the student gives helpful feedback, and really is as advanced as she feels she is (not always the case!). Even if the student wasn’t “all that,” I would likely start handling the situation the same way: “king” your student. If you’ve ever played checkers, you know the move. You want to capitalize on the student’s ambition and energy. If a student seems to be asserting, or trying to assert authority, I usually strike swiftly to co-opt that drive for my own pedagogical purposes. I’d take the student aside, either asking her to stay after class, or to come to my office for a chat. I’d begin by talking about the great things I noticed (as above), and then—the kicker—I’d ask for her help. Maybe I’d give her a specific task, such as “I’ve noticed that Student A and Student B really respond well to you, and they need extra support in their writing anyway, I wonder if you’d help me ‘look out’ for them…” or maybe even give her a more official role, as someone who can speak about X writing situation and how she strategizes/handles it, in class one day. Maybe I’d just ask her to be my “wingman” during workshop and/or group time, and have her circulate, as I do, to help answer questions. The help the student can give probably depends on the rapport you can create, and the level of the student’s abilities. Either way, I’d work to pull her into my confidence rather than opposing her. It will likely diffuse her by affirming the skills, knowledge and experience she has—and it might even turn into a situation where I could mentor her in her own writing! Also, don’t forget that you are the expert here, not the student. You are the one who is making a career out of the content of the class, and teaching in general. From this place of confidence and strength, you can assert your authority in a very strategic way, and the student will think it is her idea. Good luck! (NGV)

–Dear Frustrated,
What you should do depends upon to what degree you want to address this student, and whether or not other students in the classroom are affected by this student’s behavior.

Having a classroom of students who want to be there and feel they have something to learn or contribute makes for a positive learning environment. This is something I might share with the entire class (when this student is in attendance of course). Or, go to her directly, and find a polite way to say: “You’re being an @$$hole and I’d like it to stop because it’s affecting other student’s ability to learn.” (LF)

Dear WSU Teaching,
A major technological breakdown occurs on a day when my lesson plan depends on being able to access the wiki and/or the Internet, period. Improvise and try to do the lesson sans-technology? (Maybe giving the class a quick bathroom break while you mentally regroup?) Troop everyone over the library, and hope there are enough computers open? Call it a snow day and let everyone go early?
- Panicked in Pontiac

–Dear Panicked:
It depends on the lesson. If you’re only relying on the media to set up a lesson, try regrouping for a minute and extending any in-class work significantly. I try and be pragmatic and optimistic about how we can achieve the same goals in a different way – noting that this will involve much more conversation about what they want from the class (but secretly keeping all my objectives in place as much as possible).

I’ve trooped over to the Library on two occasions. WARNING. The second floor as you know is pretty loud, but the third floor’s designation of ‘silent study’ can cause floor monitors to treat you like a 12 year old if you can’t keep your class extremely quiet (we were working very quietly on peer reviews), or may, in extreme cases, cause unstable library patrons to suddenly snap and yell at your barely audible students. This true story involved a sudden three F-Bomb outburst directed at my most timid group of students, followed by 22 heads down and quiet giggling, followed by a deep-voice from a great distance making a subsequent appeal for the irate patron to simply ‘take a chill-pill b!@#$’.(JG)

–Dear Panicked in Pontiac,
My dad always says, “You gotta have a plan!” and I would add, “You gotta have a back up plan!” Even without relying on technology, any class plan can go awry (class discussion doesn’t take off, no one has done the reading, drafts don’t arrive when they should). I have experienced this moment a few times this semester, when the computers in 337 don’t want to play nice, and my typical reaction, after making awkward jokes, mumbling at the computer, and telling my students I need a moment to think, is to rely on my students to run the show.

It’s really not so scary.

For example, if my plan was to work through some tutorials on using the library databases, I might instead have my students work through a KWL on research (What do you know? What do you want to know? What did you learn?). As a whole class, we might do a KWL for one students’ project. On the board, I would write two columns: What do you know about (student topic)? What do you want to know about (student topic)? I would give students some time to think through and jot down ideas about the one topic. Then we would share ideas and collaborate on a list. From there, we could generate questions about the topic. Then, I would ask the individual student which questions seem most valuable for his/her project. After identifying those, we’d talk through potential sources and how to find these sources. This could segue us back into how to examine the library databases, as we would have identified some keywords in our discussion. From there, students could work in pairs to do the same thing on their own topics, and, for suggested homework, could attempt a database search and report back, or could be ready to conduct one the next time the classroom technology wanted to play.

In short, my response is, when all else fails, access students’ prior knowledge. See what they have to say about the topic. See what questions they have. Guide them to think about how this prior knowledge may apply to their current project. If you think you don’t have time to do the tech-based lesson in the next class meeting, you can follow up on the impromptu class discussion with helpful links, sources, etc. on the wiki, blog, or Blackboard. (AJ)

LaToya Faulk received her MA in Rhetoric and Writing Michigan State University in 2009. She joined the department as a lecturer in 2011 and is currently teaching ENG 1020.

Jared Grogan is a PhD Candidate in the Department and joined the faculty as a lecturer in Fall 2011. His research interests include Rhetorical Theory, Ecology and Sustainability, Eco-Composition, and Pedagogy. He currently teaches English 1020.

Nicole Guinot Varty received her MA in Written Communication and the Teaching of Writing from Eastern Michigan University in 2009. She joined the department as a lecturer in 2011 and is currently teaching ENG 1020.

Adrienne Jankens is a Ph.D. candidate and lecturer teaching ENG 1020. She is interested in inquiry pedagogy and collaborative research practices.

Thomas Trimble is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department. He is also a recent Ph.D. graduate of the department, whose dissertation “Rhetorical Outcomes: A Genre Analysis of Student Service-Learning Writing” used genre theory to theorize writing assessment issues in service-learning courses. Thomas is currently teaching ENG 1020, and has taught ENG 1010 and ENG 3010 previously.

By means of the clack of a mouse, any person can right of entry an hard to believe affluence of in sequence on topics ranging from aardvarks to zygotes. We employ desktops, laptops, palmtops, and cellular telephones to attach through telephone appearance, wire relations, and wireless ports. The Internet is at this time. It has completed our lives better-off and easier; it has misshapen limits and prolonged horizons.

What might you think? At first, as an instructor, you might struggle to find meaning. You might be worried about the student’s ability to write in a coherent manner, but may be inclined to give the student the benefit of the doubt. The rest of the essay is worded similarly, which causes concern, but you have seen a struggling writer before. You make careful, constructive comments, grade the paper, and move on.

Guess what? You just got synonym’d (trademark pending). This paragraph was copied from a free essay service called 123helpme.com. However, it did not appear on the website in these words. Instead, I pasted it into my Word document and found synonyms for every word that I could. This paragraph was the result. While SafeAssign did register one sentence as plagiarized due to the impossibility of finding synonyms for words such as “desktops,” the rest of the sentences were not recognized.

I was recently presented with this situation as I was grading papers. The paper had a significantly high percentage of reported plagiarism on SafeAssign, but I felt obliged to look over the entire paper to determine if any of the paper was original. Only a thorough examination of the student’s essay as well as the original essay made me recognize that the student’s entire essay was plagiarized. Looking back, I probably should have realized that the words were not really my student’s, but I wanted to give him/her the benefit of the doubt and I thought that s/he was really struggling to find the words to argue his/her point. Instead, I discovered that s/he was playing me for a fool. While I have learned to take these sorts of violations less personally, I was still frustrated with the student and my own gullibility.

In my particular case, the student obviously synonym’d quickly, not even bothering to alter the last half of the paper. I was only able to catch the plagiarism via SafeAssign because of the student’s apparent lack of attention to detail. However, not all students might translate an entire essay so hastily. With a deeper understanding of how synonyms work, a student might be able to produce a decent (but still plagiarized) essay that does not so closely match the original and therefore pass the scrutiny of SafeAssign.

It is this thought that seems to be even more frightening than the paragraph I invented above. How exactly are we supposed to know when a student is plagiarizing if they have become so diabolical about it? Students have evaded doing actual work since the beginning of time, or so I am told, so this isn’t surprising, but disturbing nonetheless. For every innovation meant to prevent students from cheating, there is a creative way for students to circumvent it. The only advice I can offer is to trust your teacherly instincts and watch out for this strange and acrobatic form of plagiarism. Otherwise, you might get synonym’d.

Alisa Allkins is a PhD candidate in Literary & Cultural Studies who is currently teaching ENG 1020 and tutoring in the Writing Center.

The central idea, here, is to manage time effectively by distributing a single peer-review workshop across multiple class sessions. For example, one can save time for group reflection by making part of the peer-review portion a take-home assignment. What has worked well for me is to have students answer one set of peer-review questions during the class period, and then answer another set of questions at home, before the next class period. For instance, for the rhetorical analysis workshop, I’ll have students discuss their partner’s analysis of the rhetorical situation during class, and then have them respond to their partner’s analysis of the rhetorical appeals at home, which they share with their partner during the next class session.

As well, I find it useful to have students create their own workshop questions as part of the take-home assignment, which students can use to shape peer-review activity in the next class session. Specifically, this is helpful for sustaining a productive question-answer dialogue through the second workshop session, in that it asks students to do something on that second day besides merely reciting their answers to the assigned take-home questions.

Ian Kennedy is GTA and PhD candidate in Film & Media Studies currently teaching ENG 1020. He is also a member of the program’s Mentoring Committee.

My course policies are a hodge-podge of instinctual rules, departmental mandates, and reflections of my personal pet peeves. Because most of my course policies were created before I stood in front of a classroom, I couldn’t know if they would be effective until I put them into practice. As the semester began, I found myself struggling to enforce these quasi-arbitrary rules, and eventually discovered that I had absolutely no ability to say “no.”

Late students. Late papers. Absent students. Absent papers. Plagiarized papers. These situations swirled around my head the first couple of months, which was disorienting because I was juggling 24 students with different agendas and expectations. To all of these situations (which were mostly requests for exceptions to deadlines) I said, “Okay, let’s make a deal,” and I would proceed to wildly improvise a new policy to fit this new situation. It left me stuttering, flustered, and doubting myself as an instructor.

Then, magically a new situation appeared about halfway through the semester. I won’t be specific, but let’s just say there was only one way to react to it: absolutely no. The student met with me in my office and tried to approach the situation in every way s/he knew how—appealing to my better nature, firmly looking me in the eye, confusedly looking at me as if to say “What is the problem?” All of these approaches would have probably worked had the situation not been so completely cut and dry.

To all of these things, I said, “no.” I said “no” so many times, I didn’t even know I had the capacity to keep saying “no.” Of course, it was much more diplomatic than a simple “no”: I repeated the course’s policies and the student’s only possible actions several times, but the underlying message rang loud and clear: no, no, definitely no.

When I began saying no, I felt bad. The weight of each denial came with an added bonus of doubt: was I treating this student fairly? Was there anything I could do? However, at some point the no’s became liberating, and I slowly began to feel the weight lift off. By the time the student had left my office, I had said no about a dozen different times and ways, and I felt great about it.

I won’t say that I magically began saying “no” to every late paper or tardy student. However, boundaries slowly began forming in my mind which will help me shape my course policies in the future. When I did manage to say “no,” I was able to say it with more conviction and less guilt. In the end, I want to be an empathetic teacher but I also need to care about myself as a teacher, scholar, and person. As I put my rules into practice this semester, they made more sense and became less arbitrary. The rules for which I have no reason or justification—well, they might not appear on the syllabus next semester.

Alisa Allkins is a PhD candidate in Literary & Cultural Studies who is currently teaching ENG 1020 and tutoring in the Writing Center.

Rhetorical knowledge provides the skills needed to “analyze and act on understandings of audience, purposes, and contexts in creating and comprehending texts” (WPA’s “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing”), so I ask students to compose a rhetorical analysis where they critically examine the writers attempts when persuading an audience (see assignment description below). However I suck teeth and roll eyes at what I call soulless academic essays—an essay where there is little personality, and a whole lot of pontification for the sake of pontificating (or in this case a rhetorical analysis for the sake of a rhetorical analysis).

I constantly question better ways to instruct my students on voice, which is another way of saying style or stylistic expressions in writing. According to Paul Butler “style…involves a series of both conscious and unconscious choices that writers make about everything from the words used (diction) and their arrangement in sentences (syntax) to the tone with which we express our point of view.” Nevertheless, such a definition should also consider genre restrictions or rethinking genre constructions in ways that ‘push/pull the genre forward,’— think T-Pain and auto tunes, or better yet (theory heads) think Bakhtin’s heteroglossia.

Anyways, the opportunities for style shift are based solely on the purpose of the assignment and the conventions of the genre. Rhetorical analysis explores rhetorical effect within a given artifact, but also it forces students to consider how the author sells his or her truth.

My students seem to be so caught up with locating rhetorical devices and getting the essay done, that many of them lose sight of unique stylistic expressions. Rather than consider their own rhetorical appeals (ethos, logos, and pathos) when composing a rhetorical analysis where they examine rhetorical appeals of others. The result: student essays that provide monotone analysis or detailed summarizes of the text(s) they’ve chosen. While caught up with asking students to push their rhetorical analysis further, or my favorite comment LESS SUMMARY AND MORE ANALYSIS–CONSIDER VOICE, I’ve also come across essays that seem to do style well, but lack an analysis that can be concluded as rhetorical.

For instance, take student X for example, when analyzing rhetorically Jesymn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones one student writes (paragraph 7/final draft):

Jesymn Ward addresses Discourse Elitism by contrasting conceptions of poverty against Esch’s broad intelligence and poetic language. In this society, there is a certain stigma associated with all things of and related to the Discourse of the poor. However, Ward establishes that character Esch (along with the whole Batiste Family) is well versed in this Discourse to say the least. This family is the poorest of poor. They live in a tiny, perpetually dirty home aptly titled “The Pit,” fighting pit bulls, swimming in dirty water, and stealing from neighboring farmers. Ward makes sure to thoroughly describe and emphasize the poverty of the Baptiste family to ensure that any and all negative stereotypes will be applied to them: they are the perfect antithesis to the Elite Discourse. The proverbial cherry on top of this poverty sundae is Esch’s pregnancy. A predominant problem associated with the young, the poor, and the black is teen pregnancy.

What’s interesting about this essay is the author’s ability to utilize his reading of the text, and synthesize and infer from additional readings— James Gee’s “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction” and Elaine Richardson’s “African American Literacies: Introduction.” For this student, the readings helped better situate the novel and the character’s usage of black vernacular within a setting of rural poverty in Salvage the Bones.

Regarding style, notice the author’s authority of language, but most importantly the usage of sensory words like “The proverbial cherry on top of this poverty sundae,” to hone the effect of Esch’s pregnancy. The essay personalizes the assignment, and moves away from the formulaic rhetorical analysis where in which students report their responses to the text with a rhetorical appeal-by- rhetorical appeal organizational approach with very little voice or character. However, throughout the entire essay no where does the student provide actual excerpts from the text as proof of his analysis.

I continue to ponder voice, syntax and the relationship between stylistic effect and other more dominate rhetorical concepts, if not but for the sake of soulful student drafts. Perhaps a game of adjectives might work—or an exercise on the usage of similes and metaphors. Nevertheless, the question still stands, as readers (of student writing) how do we better teach students how to use language effectively to foreground style? How do we get students to a place where their final drafts are as exciting and impactful as finding a new book we’ve been longing to read?

LaToya Faulk received her MA in Rhetoric and Writing Michigan State University in 2009. She joined the department as a lecturer in 2011 and is currently teaching ENG 1020.

This is my second semester teaching a pilot section of Eng 3010, but my first teaching the newly designed reflective component of this course. For those of you that are less familiar with the pilot project, there are six instructors involved in the study. The instructors are split into pairs to test the value of a Writing About Writing (WAW) approach as an alternative to the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) curriculum currently in place here at Wayne: two of the instructors teach control sections of WAC; two teach pilot sections of WAW; the remaining two instructors teach pilot sections of WAW with a reflective component. Initial research seems to indicate that having students consciously reflect on their writing throughout the course of a semester better prepares them to transfer key concepts and strategies from Eng 3010 to the Writing Intensive (WI) courses in their respective majors. In the latter sections, instructors work in opportunities for students to compare their past writing experiences with their experiences writing in 3010. Namely, the students are asked to reflect on the process of composing the semester’s three larger projects.

Being that I’ve never taught specifically reflective assignments, I must admit that I was not particularly well-prepared for this semester. Although I’ve always encouraged students to think about how the writing that they are doing in any given course might be of use to them in other contexts, I have relatively little experience developing assignments that focus on this task directly. That is, although reflective exercises have been present in my courses, reflection has always been more of an implicit or secondary component of assignments; an afterthought at best. As a result, I continue to struggle to find ways of incorporating reflective exercises that students might actually find useful or productive. Primarily, my concern is that students don’t often see the value of reflection. In some ways, I think this is a result of their past experiences with reflection. For many students, reflection seems to connote a different practice than crafting a formal argument. Students don’t often take these assignments very seriously because they think of them as journaling exercises. Reflective assignments seem more informal, even less serious. The result is that these assignments end up reading more like a list of likes and dislikes, than a careful argument about one’s writing.

This brings me to the primary tension of reflection: Although there is clearly value to having students reflect more informally on (and in) their writing, how do we get students to realize that there is more at stake here? The problem, I think, is that students believe that there are two kinds of writing that we do in the classroom. When it comes to more formal and conventionally restricted genres, such as larger research papers, reflection takes a clear backseat. Students believe that they are either (A) writing a formal paper evacuated of personal voice or (B) writing from a personal position, that has no larger stake outside the classroom. In this sense, the goals that we set out for students seem contradictory. For all the talk we do about audience, we spend very little time helping students to see that they are often (if not always) writing for themselves. The main difficulty that I’m having this semester is showing my students that these purposes are not mutually exclusive. Although writing for an outside audience may conflict with one’s personal interests, beliefs, assumptions, etc. this does not mean that personal reflection is invalid or unimportant.

In some ways, the theoretical component that we are introducing students to in pilot sections of 3010 nicely prepares them for this connection. Students are assigned readings by scholars broadly interested in the topic of discourse communities. They are asked to reflect on their own attempts to enter professional and disciplinary communities where they have little or no authority. I’ve also had a relative degree of success drawing on Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University.” Bartholomae argues that when students sit down to write at the university, they must appropriate or be appropriated by a specialized discourse that is remarkably foreign to them. They invent the university, he argues, by assembling and “mimicking” its language:

They must learn to speak our language. Or they must dare to speak it, or to carry out the bluff, since speaking and writing will most certainly be required long before the skill is “learned.” And this, understandably, causes problems.

Bartholomae goes on to identify what he takes to be the central problem facing teachers of composition at the university. He notes that in an effort to let students try on authority, we develop classroom exercises that deny the classroom. We ask students, that is, to speak as though they already occupy a privileged position or as authorities on a given subject. Although these exercises help students to imagine the needs and goals of an audience, they fail to address the central problem of academic writing, where students must assume the right to speak on an issue that others know better than them.

Despite the rather obvious critique of university writing, one that centers on the tension between our claims to be teaching students and our appeals to tests, measures, and writing performances that are always largely outside or before student capability, Bartholomae also seems to recognize the value of this tension. Namely, he calls us to consider what it might mean to teach to conflicts relating to audience and authority. My experiences teaching reflective assignments in 3010 seem to back up Bartholomae’s position. What I’ve tried to do, with mixed success, is to let students try out a variety of audiences. In the larger assignments that they write throughout the semester, I ask them to try writing as if they were authorities in Writing Studies. That said, I’ve also tried to temper this kind of work with reflective activities that call them to think seriously about their weaknesses or shortcomings as students that are just beginning to try out theories that have a much longer history. In particular, I’ve tried to emphasize that although they are not yet “experts” on issues pertinent to the field of composition, they can still speak to issues that experts find valuable, interesting, etc. The difference, as I’ve framed it in my course this semester, is between writing as an expert and writing to experts. Although students are clearly not in a position to speak with much authority, recent interest in student scholarship opens up channels for students to try out expertise with compelling results. For example, in their research proposals at the beginning of the semester, many of my students argued that what is largely missing from WAW scholarship is a student perspective. Although WAW scholars talk about issues facing students, many of my students argue that the field suffers from its inability to account or speak from a position outside the teacher-student binary.

If I’ve learned one very important lesson this semester, it is that the tension of university learning can actually be really productive if we are honest with our students. As much as we want students to see reflective assignments as gateways or sources of empowerment, it seems important to consistently remind them that we are their audience (being that we are giving them a grade), that learning is a sometimes contradictory and frustrating experience, and that completing one assignment, however proficiently, will not give them the keys to the car, so to speak. I guess what I’m pushing against here is the sense that reflective assignments, because of their holistic nature, escape the critical tension that Bartholomae discusses above. This does not mean that these assignments do not have value, just that we need to be similarly attentive to the problems of audience and authority that persist at every level.

Derek Risse is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric & Composition at WSU with research interests in New Media and Animal Studies. He is currently teaching both 1020 and 3010 and serves as a member of the program’s Mentoring Committee.

* How is ethos different from logos?
* What strategies does this author use to persuade her reader?
* What do you hope to accomplish by writing this paper?

The correct choice is – none of the above. At least, that’s what I’ve concluded after three months of teaching. It’s not that hands go shooting up when I ask questions like these, but that there’s one query virtually guaranteed to get no responses; to leave everyone fidgeting and looking everywhere but the front of the room so they don’t have to say anything; it even silences that one kid – you know the one – who is so desperate for class participation points that he’d put up a paw if you asked for a thorough explanation of the differences between general and special relativity, in under six words, and you would fail the class forever if you get it wrong.

Yeah, it’s that hard to get an answer for this question. So naturally, it’s probably one of the most important ones we can ask our students, and one that we absolutely need responses on.

Are you ready? Here it is:

“Any questions?”

If three months of teaching has taught me anything, it’s that no one ever has any questions – at least, not when you ask if they do. Not when you’ve set aside class time to field questions after introducing an assignment, or after you’ve just spent ten minutes explaining some difficult rhetorical concept that you know you yourself struggled with in freshman comp. You ask, “Does this make sense? Is anything about this confusing?”, and no one says a word. So you move on – and then you discover as you’re reading rough drafts that half the class thinks “pathos” means “opinion,” or that they actually don’t know how to create new pages on the Wiki and then link to them. Clearly, there were things they were confused about, so why didn’t they have questions? You would have happily spent the entire rest of the class period explaining XYZ if only they had asked!

One solution is simply to allow more time for students to formulate questions, but even then, you might only get a handful of inquiries about relatively superficial matters, like a paper’s due date. A more effective strategy I’ve tried out with my class is not to ask if anyone has a question, but to have everyone give me some feedback via a simple sentence completion exercise.

This strategy comes from Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill’s Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms, and requires just a little preparation ahead of time. Generate a list of sentence beginnings, such as “The thing I still don’t understand about this concept is…”, “What worries me about this assignment is…”, “What really interested me about the reading for today is…”, and so on. Here is the list of sentence completions I used after introducing the Ad Analysis assignment:

That last one is a special favorite of mine: a tongue-in-cheek way to let students know that the floor is still open to any and all questions, even if they don’t fit one of the predetermined shapes I’ve offered. I post my list on the day’s Wiki, then give everyone five minutes in-class to complete one sentence of their choosing. I then go around the room and ask everyone to read their sentence. You can choose to answer/address each student’s response one at a time, or record them on a whiteboard or a sheet of paper, then respond to common questions and concerns.

Doing this with my students has been illuminating. In particular, by doing this as I’m introducing a project, I can get a sense of where my assignment description is less than clear, what I need to spend more time on or add to my lesson plan, and even where students are emotionally with the project. For them, it can be a chance to see that they aren’t the only ones anxious or worried about some aspect of the paper – or to catch a little of someone else’s enthusiasm.

I like this exercise for introducing projects, but it can also be a very effective way to kick off reading discussion. One important caveat: this can eat up a lot of time, especially if you address each student’s response individually. But compared to getting no questions, then having to backtrack to cover problems discovered in drafts, it’s a nice problem to have.

Kerin Ogg is a GTA and PhD Candidate in the department in Film & Media Studies who currently teaches ENG 1020 and works as a tutor in the Writing Center.