About the Author

George Shamshayooadeh teaches English composition and literature at The National Hispanic University in San Jose, California. He is currently completing a Ph.D. in English at Old Dominion University with twin emphases is rhetoric-composition and literary studies. He holds two master’s degrees in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and English Literature. George has also taught at a number of community colleges in Northern California as well as San Jose State University. Prior to his work in Silicon Valley, he taught English composition and literature courses at a number of universities and institutions in Tehran, Iran, including the Islamic Open (Azad) University, College of Foreign Languages. His research interests are diverse and vary from composition theory and pedagogy to narratology and postcolonial fiction.

Contents

Introduction

Literature Review

Methodology and Application

Pedagogical Implications

Case Study

Course Arrangement

Conclusion

Works Cited

Introduction 

In the light of prevalent and ubiquitous intertextual relations in academic texts, there is an acute, palpable need to develop writing instruction that addresses students’ often insufficient requisite background knowledge (e.g. schemata) as well as understanding of intertextual relations at both the receptive and productive ends of the composing process (Porter; Bazerman). Indeed, the need for students to read about the disciplinary debates in order to become familiar with arguments and issues within the proverbial Burkean parlor is clearly needed. The presence of underprepared students who are not ready to tackle the demands of expository and argumentative writing at the post-secondary level, which has been reported by Ann M. Johns and others, provides us with the exigence to revamp the teaching of writing in such a way that takes account of the interconnectivity of texts at conceptual and linguistic levels.

Johns --who for years directed the American Language Institute, the Writing Across the Curriculum Program, and the Center for Teaching and Learning at San Diego State University-- reports that “discipline specific faculty who teach novices at the undergraduate level … sometimes complain that their students ‘do not like to write like academics’ or ‘cannot comprehend’ academic prose, arguing that these are general abilities that we should be teaching" (505). As Judy Parr aptly notes, students’ writing is often perceived as weak compared to their knowledge and performance in other subjects such as reading and Mathematics. Additionally, William J. Torgerson’s following statement is typical of many instructors’ experiences in developmental and first-year composition classes: “In the first stack of papers I collected, I read a lot of thinly researched projects about abortion, capital punishment, and violence in the media” (87). It also confirms my experiences of grading stacks of freshman composition papers over the last ten years in Northern California. Thus, a new approach to writing instruction with new pedagogical implications is called for. In this paper, I will propose an intertextual approach to composition instruction, grounded in theories of intertextuality as well as the Bakhtinian notions of addressivity heteroglossia, and dialogism, in order to provide a rich rhetorical and conceptual framework that would facilitate student writing, particularly in terms of appropriation and application of texts and the means to achieving persuasion through Burkean identification via positionality.

Despite the influence that Bakhtinian theories and terms have exerted in literary and cultural studies as well as in genre studies, their influence in composition studies has been relatively modest. For instance, they have been used to shed light on “the individual writer’s philosophical or political filter” (Middendorff 205). Thus, for the most part Bakhtinian notions have not been systematically implemented in composition classrooms. Given the fact that heteroglossia exists fundamentally as a characteristic of language and not merely of the novel, it can potentially be used not only critically to shed light on argumentative and expository writing as practiced in college composition classes, but also productively to generate a more detailed intertextual practice in student writing. In “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin elaborates on the multiplicity of languages, dialects, idiolects, and other variations of language that constitute the social stratifications of language. His elucidation of the varieties of language as well as their social correlates is informative:

In any given historical moment of verbal-ideological life, each generation at each social level has its own language; moreover, its own vocabulary, its own particular accentual system that, in their turn, vary depending on social level, academic institution (the language of the cadet, the high school student, the trade school student are all different languages) and other stratifying factors. (290)

Bakhtin’s above-cited description of the heteroglossia that exists in the society ties the varieties of language to the various locations and periods along with their prevalent values, vocabularies, and other distinctive characteristics that set them apart from others. Another noteworthy aspect of social heteroglossia is the dynamic “co-existence of social-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between the different epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form” (291). Furthermore, Bakhtin perceptively observes that the aforementioned languages “of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying ‘languages’” (291). A similar conceptualization of academic texts comprising the coexistence and juxtaposition of the authorial text and its relations to other texts is plausible since it lends itself well to an intertextual conceptualization of academic writing. Furthermore, within the context of academic writing, the Bakhtinian centripetal (unifing) and centrifugal (dispersing) forces are quite apparent since they theoretically encompass the points of convergence and disagreement within the disciplines (discourse communities); hence capturing its dynamic and ever-evolving nature.

At the heart of the text, as of the Bakhtinian utterance is addressivity in the sense that each text has its envisioned audience and is written at least in part to respond to their ideas, views, and anticipated or real objections and queries. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin notes: “The word in a living conversation is directly, blatantly oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction” (280). These dialogic relations are approachable from both productive and receptive angles. From the productive end, the author is viewed as the one who draws on his/her conscious and subconscious knowledge of various texts to put together a text at a given time; thus generating a “mosaic” of already existing texts in a new configuration rather than creating it anew. From the receptive end, the readers’ interpretation of a text relates to their schemata including familiarity with the specific genre and its characteristics as well as their prior knowledge of germane themes, motifs, arguments, and contextual factors that may shed light on the text under consideration. Of paramount importance is the nexus between audience and author from a dialogic perspective that approaches the production of texts as an intrinsically dialogic process.

Charles Bazerman defines intertextuality as “The explicit and implicit relations that a text or utterance has to prior, contemporary and potential future texts” (86). Although intertextual relations are generally acknowledged, as Scollon, Young, Tsang, and Jones have pointed out, these interrelations are often simplistically reduced to quoting and paraphrasing in composition classes without situating them as part of an overarching conceptual and pedagogical framework that takes account of the explicit and implicit interconnections between texts and is guided by a textual purpose within an intertextual framework. For instance, one of the issues that writing instructors often complain about is the shallowness and superficiality of students’ arguments and the thinness of their evidence, which stem from their insufficient intertextual knowledge of the discourse community at its receptive end, which is also tied to the issue of invention and appropriation of texts and ideas for their authorial purposes at the productive end. As Ann M. Johns reports, faculty often complain that their students “do not write like academics” or “cannot comprehend” academic writing (505).

Students’ violations and misappropriations of writing conventions range from organization and arrangement of the material to language, style, and diction issues. I would contend that adopting a dialogic, intertextual approach to writing instruction that incorporates multiple texts on a given topic and explicitly expounds and highlights their various intertextual relations would be instrumental to student-writers’ formation of authorial and textual identities. Furthermore, such an approach would entail the re-conceptualization of invention, persuasion, and audience within the framework of intertextuality. Hence, a review of the theories and premises underlying Burkean identification and intertextuality is in order to explicate their underlying conceptual premises and pedagogical implications.

About the Author

Kristi McDuffie is a Ph.D. Student in English Studies at Illinois State University with a focus on Rhetoric and Composition. Her research interests center on rhetorics of race, Latin@ rhetorics, language ideologies, and digital literacies. Her publications to date have explored writing center pedagogy, narrative discourse in television, and models of literacy in young adult dystopian fiction.

Contents

Introduction

The Term "Hispanic"

Research Methods

The Use of Hispanic

Hispanic as an Ethnicity

Hispanic as a Race

Conclusions

Works Cited

Introduction

Is "Hispanic" a race or an ethnicity? Although the government definition of "Hispanic" is based on national origin, the term has increasingly been used as a racial term in many discourse communities in the U.S. As many scholars have illustrated, both the treatment of Latinos and the term "Hispanic" have been problematic throughout U.S. history. In the twenty-first century, amidst increasing fear of immigration that is largely directed at Latinos (and particularly Mexican and Mexican-Americans), the term continues to evolve and influence public discourse about many events. For example, the question of whether "Hispanic" is a race or an ethnicity is the central question in a topic debated in Orlando in April of 2009. Due to a law enacted in 1964, a particular school board committee must be made up equally of black and white members. When this biracial mandate was brought to the attention of the local news, Hispanics protested and requested to be included on the committee. Based on the definition of "Hispanic" as a national-origin term, the school board responded that Hispanics could be included as one of the two races.

The debate as illustrated in the local online news articles and anonymous comments responding to this event focuses on the race-versus-ethnicity question regarding the term. In this paper, I will briefly review the history of the term “Hispanic” and the racialization of the term. Next, I will describe my research methods and the background of the Orlando school board controversy as the case I will be analyzing. My findings describe the themes evident in the responses and potential motivations for those responses. Ultimately, I find that the debate about the potential inclusion of Hispanics on the committee demonstrates how problematic the panethnic label continues to be. Utilizing the term to invoke group identity for political participation failed to have any impact in this particular case because change was not in the best interest of the institutions that use this term. Using the term as a race or an ethnicity is not likely to produce significant change for the people included in this label due to the historic and ongoing marginalization of the group.

About the Author

Elizabeth Bracey is a second-year graduate student in the English program at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. She earned her BA in forensic psychology from John Jay College of Criminal Justice where she began working as a tutor at the college’s writing center. She continues to work with John Jay College students to improve their writing and their approaches to revision.

Contents

Introduction

Literature Review

Methodology

Results

Discussion

Works Cited 

Introduction

It is the hope of classroom instructors and of writing tutors that students will feel motivation to perform their best on assignments. Equally, the instructor or tutor hopes that students will ask for help if they are unsure of how to proceed. However, it often seems that students do not want help and that, when they receive it, particularly in the form of professor or tutor comments, students are hard-pressed to take the advice that is offered to them. In fact, students seem mostly to report concern for problems that appear on the syntactical level. Nancy Sommers explains that this inability to revise beyond syntax and word choice is a critical problem in student writing (“Responding to Student Writing”  124). For many college students, coherence and logic in writing are secondary concerns if they are concerns at all. However, the process of revision may also be contingent upon the comments of professors and tutors and the way in which these comments might motivate the student to take more than a cursory glance at his or her work.

On the one hand, it is possible that students view revision as a negative task. In Nancy Sommers’s view, students do not want to make global-level revisions because of fear or nervousness or because of the perception of comments and revision as punitive (“Between the Drafts”). Reinforcing this idea, Chris Anson points out that students’ understanding of the teachers’ expectations may also affect what becomes important in writing, prompting them to focus overwhelmingly on one writing component and neglecting to acknowledge others. As a result, students who do not acknowledge both global and sentence-level problems may appear unmotivated or lazy in their approach to revision. However, students’ motivation to take a comprehensive approach to revision is more likely to be based in their expectations of themselves and their professors’ expectations of them. In light of this, it is relevant to ask what might help a student to become more engaged in his or her own process of revision. That is, what interventions might encourage students to think more critically about the writing they do and how to approach revisions to it?  Indeed, there are many motivators to comprehensive revision other than one’s relationship to a professor. Social, environmental, and even developmental factors are significant areas of consideration in evaluating students’ motivation.  However, this project aims to address the role of pedagogical practice in motivation, particularly the influence of the teacher comments on motivating students to revise, since commenting and motivation are rarely assessed together, and thus a critical part of students’ performances on writing tasks has not been evaluated.

Studies addressing students’ motivation to write well have examined many critical influences. Researchers have evaluated motivation according to students’ perceptions of themselves and perceptions of their futures as well as their perception of coursework as being too difficult or too simple to warrant revision[1].   However, the relationship between commenting and student motivation has not been assessed thoroughly. Students’ performances in class are often internally motivated by their perceptions of the facility or difficulty of an assignment. That is, students are likely to feel motivated or unmotivated based on the level of challenge that they perceive to exist in a class assignment (Wardle 74). Elizabeth Wardle elaborates on this idea in her article “Understanding ‘Transfer’ from FYC: Preliminary Results of a Longitudinal Study.” Wardle’s study of seven students, from their freshman year composition classes until approximately their junior years in college, found that motivation played an integral role in the students’ abilities to apply information learned in freshman composition to other aspects of writing. Wardle found that students who perceived their professors’ expectations to be low often did not feel as motivated to make significant changes to their writing styles or to their work as they did when they found that professors’ expectations were higher (74).  Moreover, Wardle found that assignments that might be considered “engaging” or challenging were often perceived to be harder, which prompted students to select easier assignments or to drop classes rather than feel motivated to work harder (78). The result was often that the students’ grades were not as high, which may, in turn, have affected the motivation of the student to continue trying to improve his or her writing at all. This finding calls into question students’ expectations of themselves as writers and the perceived need they have for help based on those expectations.

While some students may find teacher expectations to be the factor that motivates or fails to motivate their writing, other students may expect that they are unable to write at an appropriate or successful level. As a result, students may develop a sense of dependence on instruction and commenting that may impede their ability to revise on their own (“Between the Drafts” 124). Nancy Sommers cogently addresses the issue of academic authority in her essay “Between the Drafts,” in which she emphasizes the feeling that a student must create an artificial version of him or herself in order to communicate with the appropriate audience. This issue of authority is extremely relevant when considering student response to teacher comments as well as the approach to revision. In “Responding to Student Writing,” Sommers points out that students do not want to “take the risk of changing anything” (124) that has not been commented on, since students may feel that they are not authoritative enough to make this type of judgment. Therefore, fear is part of what motivates student revision or lack thereof.

On the other hand, studies seeking to examine student cognition and self-efficacy in relation to writing successes have found that students whose self-efficacy is disproportionate to their actual abilities are less likely to seek help, regardless of the suggestions of others that they might benefit from additional support (Williams & Takaku; Patchdan, Charney & Schunn).  This suggests that some students do not seek help even if their professors feel it is necessary because the students do not feel as though they need it. The students’ perceptions are that they write adequately and that they perform well. Students who have this expectation but who have self-efficacies that are disproportionate to their abilities often blame low grades or struggles with writing on external factors or avoid actively seeking help (McCarthy, Meier, & Rinderer qtd. in Williams & Takaku  3). For example, students might justify poor performance by explaining that the professor’s grading system was simply too difficult or that the professor was incompetent rather than speculating that they might need to improve aspects of their writing and approaches to revision. Therefore, when a student is recommended to the writing center because of the professor’s perception of the student’s need for help, it is likely that the student will not be as motivated to revise his or her own writing since the student has not recognized the perceived need on his or her own. This aspect is especially important to consider in a study of commenting and students’ revisions based on comments, since many students attend tutoring based on the suggestion of their professors.

About the Authors

Rachel A. Milloy is a Ph.D. student in the Rhetoric and Professional Communication program at New Mexico State University where she teaches first-year writing and technical communication courses. She serves as a writing program assistant and as a co-writer for the English department’s first-year composition textbook, Paideia 14. Her research interests include online pedagogy, composition pedagogy, writing technologies, writing program administration, and student success. When not teaching, she enjoys reading, running, and spending time outdoors.

Matthew Moberly is a doctoral student in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at New Mexico State University where he has taught first-year composition and technical communication.  His current research interests include writing center administration, incorporating information literacy into first-year writing curriculum, and assessment in higher education.  Outside of teaching and research, he enjoys cooking, watching reality television, and figuring out ways to design productive classroom activities based on the reality television he watches.

Rebecca Powell is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at New Mexico State University. She revised this article with a baby in her lap. When the baby is not in her lap, she teaches, writes, gardens, runs, and bikes. Her publications include chapters and articles on the intersections of literacy and place, expressivism pedagogy, discourses surrounding motherhood, online instructor identity, and teacher inquiry. Her research interests include writing-across-the-curriculum, literacy, place studies, and composition pedagogy.

Contents

Introduction 

The ILC: Interdisciplinary Collaboration

The ILC: Interdisciplinary Collaboration (cont.)

Collaborative Curriculum Design for Learner Independence

Dependent Learners Become Active Participants

Active Learners Gain Confidence

Confident Learners Collaboratively Investigate Real World Issues

Self-Directed Learners Take on Complex Tasks

Formative and Summative Assessment: Gathering Stories and Numbers

In Their Own Words: Assessment Outcomes

Looking Back and Looking Forward: Instructors Reflect

Works Cited

Introduction

Graduate students say “yes” to almost anything, even when that “yes” means extra work and extra meetings. In the spirit of that “yes,” we volunteered to teach in a learning community for engineers, thinking we would bring our collective expertise on writing to our classrooms. In short, we imagined ourselves as teachers, much as we had been in our traditional courses. Contrary to our expectations, we found ourselves engaged in an active collaboration across disciplines that fostered a spirit of inquiry into our teaching practices and curriculum. This inquiry and subsequent curriculum development was possible because of the interdisciplinary support available in the learning community structure.

Learning communities have historically been developed as interdisciplinary support programs for student cohorts entering the university. On its most basic level, a learning community is “a course of study designed by two or more faculty, which includes work in different disciplines and integrated around a particular issue or theme” (Bystrom 247). Jones, Laufgraben, and Morris explain that individual courses are “taught as discrete sections” but teachers “collaborate to integrate course content” (251). More specifically, learning communities, according to Jones, Laufgraben, and Morris, strive to improve students’ first-year experiences by:

1) enhancing the curriculum; 2) supporting the transition to college by creating connections between and among students and their peers, teachers, and disciplines; 3) extending learning beyond the classroom; and 4) empowering students to be more active participants in their learning and in their academic decision making. (249)

Since the early 1980s, scholars have recognized the many benefits of cohort membership. For example, Lei et al. explain that cohort education can “promote retention, graduation, and success rates of students” (497). For Harbour and Ebie, “democratic learning communities” provide a space for marginalized students to develop “deeper and more extensive relationships between members” (13). According to Mahoney and Schamber, learning communities “utilize constructivist learning, a view that knowledge is developed in community, not solely as an individual process” (234). For these reasons, learning communities foster integrative learning that “assists students with finding relevance in a curriculum” (236). Although the literature addresses the many benefits that learning communities offer students, less has been written on how learning communities foster curriculum transformation and instructor engagement. Our expectations for the learning community echoed the literature—we expected student engagement and success. We could not have predicted our own growth.

At New Mexico State University, a designated Hispanic Serving Institution, learning communities have served underprepared first-year Engineering students, offering a supportive network of peers and faculty to promote success and retention. Interdisciplinary programs such as learning communities promote the kind of learning advocated by Murnane and Levy who argue that in order to succeed in the 21st century, students need to “direct their own learning, work with and listen to others, and develop ways of dealing with complex issues and problems that require different kinds of expertise” (qtd. in Bielaczyc and Collins 272). Traditionally, first-year composition courses do this kind of work, making them perfect candidates for learning communities where students can actively participate in their learning, collaborate with peers across courses, and begin thinking about real world problems through several disciplinary perspectives.

Engineering departments around the country have been using innovative curriculum integrations to boost student achievement and communication skills (Ford and Riley 325). After one such innovation at Texas A&M, developers noted that integrated curriculum contributes to increased student motivation and performance (Everett et al. 175). To foster such student motivation and performance, the NMSU English department has worked with the College of Engineering to further develop the Integrated Learning Community (ILC) for freshmen engineering students who enter the university unprepared for required entry-level math courses. The ILC moves beyond the common two-course model, including a first-year composition course (English 111), an applied math course for engineers (EE 109), a developmental math course (Math 120 or 121), and an introductory Engineering and study skills course (SMET 101). Within this article, we explore the challenges and considerations for adapting a writing course to meet the needs of an interdepartmental learning community. We begin by providing an overview of the ILC and then examine how we adapted our writing course to meet the needs of the ILC. We end with a review of formative and summative assessment practices that informed our curriculum and teaching and a discussion of future considerations for teachers and learning communities. It is our hope that readers will use our experience as a way to either develop new interdepartmental partnerships or improve existing programs.