Results tagged “composition” from Collin vs. Blog

Debbie has an important post up about the latest issue of CCC, which "amputates" the Re/Visions feature on KB in that issue by publishing snatches of it in the journal and the complete versions online.

If there's one thing to take away from this, it's that the journal has problems, ones that aren't going away any time soon. Anyhow, here's the post length comment that I left there:

I almost blogged about this at the time, but elected not to, given that I was hazy on the confidentiality of the conversations. Although I had no role at all in the decision-making process, I was involved in some of the discussions with Deb about how to handle this problem.

The problem isn't just the ridiculously low acceptance rate--it's that rate combined with the fact that the journal has a colossal backlog right now of accepted essays. Traditionally, the answer to the latter problem has been to lower the acceptance rate--accept fewer essays, and the backlog lifts eventually. But Deb's right, I think, to note that that's not a viable solution. The acceptance rate can't honestly go much lower, and even if it could, the editor would have to start rejecting submissions that had been accepted by the readers.

The problem is one I harp on all the time, and that's scale. Our discipline is much larger than it was 10 or 20 years now, and the size of the journal hasn't accommodated the large influx of TT faculty who would like to publish work in what is arguably the flagship journal. And the problem, in my mind, is only exacerbated by a decision-making and election process that pays no attention to professional qualification. Without putting too fine a point on it, there is no guarantee that, in any given year, the people making decisions about the journal have any editorial experience.

There are several solutions that any of us might imagine for this problem, from publishing an extra issue, to temporarily adding pages, to moving to a hybrid of print and POD, etc. I can guarantee that these were all ideas that I suggested, but I don't know how many of them factored into the actual decision. I also talked with Deb about the option that they eventually chose, although my suggestion was to move review essays online, since they're less often the object of the kind of page citation that Nels raises.

So while I'm sad that this happened to you, and wouldn't have been happy had it happened to my R/V set, I also think that there's a larger problem with the journal that needs to be solved. And so I'm also sympathetic with Deb, who's had to struggle with this for some time now. There are several contributing factors--the acceptance rate, the backlog, the growth of our field and subsequent increase in the number of submissions, the obvious and warranted interest in features like Re/Visions, the fact that the average length of a CCC essay has steadily climbed over the last 20 years, the desire to keep the page count consistent, the desire to keep the price of the journal low and accessible, and so on. It's a huge problem that has very material consequences for all of us, and yet, we don't really have the organizational means to deal with it well.

Sigh. So I'm sorry, not in the it's-my-fault way, but in the damn-that-sucks way.

***

Soapboxy enough? If D's post accomplishes one thing, I hope that it sparks some sort of open and frank discussion, beyond the walls of the EC meeting, of the role that the journal plays and should be playing in our field. And how the journal might adapt to a changing economy of scale that is obvious to anyone who cares to look.

We'll see.

So here's a question.

I'm working up my syllabus for a course I'm teaching this fall, a doctoral seminar on Computers and Writing. I've got tons of notes on it, but I'm struggling a little bit with exactly how I want to (a) organize it, and (b) reduce the readings to a manageable set. Later today, I'll probably toss up a page that offers up my progress-to-date, but in the meantime, I thought I'd ask for a little collective wisdom. Here are my constraints:

The course is going to be 1/3 workshop, 2/3 seminar. That is, each week, we're spending at least an hour in our lab, where I'll be running a series of hands-on intros to a broad range of tools and platforms. The goal will be familiarity rather than mastery, of course, but I'm a big believer in the doing alongside the thinking.

One corollary of this is that I will be asking the students to work outside of class on their technology skills, and so I'll be requiring a little less reading than I normally might for a seminar. I'm pretty much decided that I'm not ordering books--my plans are to go with 3-4 chapters/articles per week.

And of course, the problem here is that a given week's topic could pretty much be the theme for an entire course, so I need to really distill rather than overwhelm. At the same time, I've got shelves and shelves of stuff I could use, not to mention all the stuff online. I'm still debating internally about whether it's best to shoot for a rough chronology of C&W or to focus on more recent developments for the most part.

Nothing to it but to do it, I suppose. Look for updates later today. Oh, and the collective wisdom part is this: what texts, perspectives, ideas do y'all think are indispensable for a course on C&W, one that's likely to be the only sustained exposure to the sub-d that these students will experience?

What, content?!

Yes, it's true. For a variety of reasons, my blog has been deep in summer slumber. But chatting with Derek about Karen Kopelson's recent piece in CCC, and the carnival thereupon, has functioned as the sharp stick, at least for the moment. Whether I'll ramp up the sleeping bear fully before the school year is still an open question.

I have a number of approaches to take to Kopelson's article, including a host of methodological concerns that seem to be the first line of inquiry I take with most of my academic reading nowadays. But I'm going to set them mostly aside for the time being; like Clancy, I'm happy to see the question of pedagogical imperative raised in explicit ways. Also, when Clancy writes, "It's not that I don't enjoy teaching or don't think it's important, but I came to the field another way," there's a healthy portion of that statement that applies to me as well. Where I differ, I suppose, is in that the teaching that I do that I find most fulfilling occurs in other places than the first-year composition classroom, and that's perhaps why I resent the "imperative" as much as I do at times. I think (and have said on occasion) that there are considerable problems in our field when it comes to graduate education. I think that, as students, instructors, colleagues, and professionals, we have allowed graduate instruction to remain mired in a model of education that plods happily along as though process never happened in our discipline. So, if you ask me, I'm still waiting for some of this so-called pedagogical imperative to take hold.

Now, that being said, I would raise one methodological complaint. And I raise it fully aware that it would be problematic in the context of Kopelson's article. There is indeed some value to knowing the extent to which lore about the dread "pedagogy chapter" circulates among graduate students and faculty. Potentially more valuable, it seems to me, and eminently possible, would be to match up these accounts against the dissertations actually generated both by the students of a given program, and those directed by the faculty who responded. Because honestly, the test of this imperative is less a matter of whether it circulates informally (because of course it does) and more a matter of whether or not it plays out across the dissertations in the field. Okay, that's all I'll say about method for the moment.

The other issue I want to raise, though, returns to the question of graduate education and the mentorship involved in any pedagogical interaction between writer and reader/director. One of the things that I learned early on, when I was muddling through my early years as an FYC instructor, was that "suggestions" coming from the instructor were very rarely interpreted as such. I learned instead to try and offer multiple choices in my feedback. Even now, I'm only sometimes better at it than others. But I like to think that it also helped me grow as a writer, someone able to take suggestions as such, think them through, and act on them as I see fit. What I'm getting at here, unfortunately, is that I think many of us forget this lesson when we enter the dissertation process. (And this is only one of the many things we forget, I'm afraid.) So it's not surprising to me that faculty might see the "pedagogical imperative" as more heuristic while their students perceive it as gospel. I've seen this pattern play out in all sorts of venues, with all sorts of students, in any number of contexts.

And this is not a matter of blaming the students, either. In many important ways, the dissertation should be about the coming-to-colleaguehood of graduate students, and to be sure, there are some faculty better at it than others. But it's a question with two answers--there are some faculty who will always make you feel like their student, and there are some students who will always treat you as faculty, even after a body's received the doctorate. Ideally, though, the dissertation is that final step into the profession as colleague instead of student, and the burden of that step is borne by everyone involved in the process. Or should be. From the students' perspective, this means an unfamiliar transition, one where they must learn to listen to faculty as colleagues rather than faculty. From the faculty perspective, we must be more cognizant of the fact that this is a transition, a process, and one where we must share some responsibility for it.

Personally, I try not to ask the "but what does this have to do with" question, because I recognize it ultimately for what it is, a dodge. It's a means of transitioning a conversation to pedagogy, when it would simply be more honest to announce "New topic! Tell me about your teaching!" I first got the question at my first CCCC in Cincy in 91, hated it then, and hate it still. It's one of those horoscopic questions for which everyone must have an answer, for which no one has a truly interesting answer, and about which most people don't honestly have much interest. It requires both a reduction of our work and a simplification of the classroom in order to answer, and the answer presumes a correspondence that doesn't really obtain for most people. It's lazy.

But I'm drifting far afield. That it exists as a pressure for our students I don't dispute. That it is asked far too often in interviews I don't question. That we will ever fully exorcize this ghost--we who are far too fond of speaking of "the discipline" as though it were real--I do doubt. But there are questions that we could be asking and answering that might render it a little less haunting:

-What percentage of dissertations in our field take the (FYC) classroom as the primary site of research? Has that percentage changed substantially in the past 5, 10, 15 years?
-Of those that do not, how many contain the obligatory pedagesture? Has that number changed?
-Is this pattern observable in other ways? For example, have topics shifted in particular journals?

And so on. It's not a critique of Kopelson to say that these questions might provocatively build upon her work here, because I appreciate the framing of these issues that she provides. Perhaps I am projecting, but some of the exhaustion I sense in her conclusion, exhaustion over the self-referentiality of our scholarship, comes from the fact that we do an awful lot of framing of our selves, to the occasional exclusion of actual research. This is a topic I'm worrying over in a current project, one close to my own heart as well. If the end result of this article (and even this discussion) is that someone takes up these questions, then I'll be grateful.

I'll probably need to return to some of these questions--my sense of textual pacing is a little rusty--but for the moment, color me finished.