Category Archives: Stuff

Bringing down the Lego House and Building It back Up

This week, I’ve decided to go a little bit off track. Instead of a reading response, I am writing about a matter that’s been in the back of my mind for a while now. This may come off more as a rambling than an actual coherent reflection, since I am going off on a particular issue that came up as I went deeper and deeper into the Rhet/Comp field. Earlier this week, while I was reviewing some class readings, I was brought back to a question I have continuously asked to both myself and the texts we’ve been reading: must all questions have answers, and must we have a solution for every problem? Regarding Rhet/Comp in particular, must we necessarily find a way to integrate all discursive practices into one harmonious package?

I would like to argue that we don’t. Rhet/Comp is a complicated and diverse place. It is made up of cultural, discursive, pedagogical, methodological tensions that give for the most interesting and complex of discussions, out of which numerous questions, debates and ideas arise. Our class is the living proof of this. But Rhet/Comp is also a field where problems sometimes seem to take center stage and coming up with a neat solution that caters to the needs and opinions of everyone often seems like a priority. One of those problems, which we’ve discussed amply in the World Rhetorics course, is how to understand, acknowledge and integrate different rhetorical practices into the teaching of writing. But do we really have to answer the “how to” question? Can’t we just question? We strive so hard to come up with answers and solutions for problems that it feels that we sometimes stifle the discussion by reducing it to a puzzle we have to complete by the end of the course.

Problems do not have to have neat, harmonious solutions. Questions don’t always need to have complete, all-encompassing answers. Sometimes, it is alright to say “I don’t know,” because it keeps the discussion alive, it allows new voices to join in, new ideas and knowledge to accumulate, intertwine or even challenge other ideas and previously established forms of knowledge. It’s good not to know whether the cat is really alive or dead, because then there is space for unconventional possibilities, multiple states of being, more than one way of looking at a particular subject.

By saying that we don’t need to have an answer for everything, I’m not letting people off the hook to not discuss the subject. On the contrary, I am saying that teachers, students, scholars, everyone, should actively pursue dialogue, one where the goal is not to say who’s right or wrong, or come up with a framework where everybody’s opinions and theories can somehow be integrated into one artfully constructed Lego house. Instead, we should pursue a type of dialogue where the goal is to share different ideas and perspectives, to learn about all the different ways of looking at that blackbird – or at different rhetorics in this case – and acknowledging that they are all valid. Of course, this won’t work if the person is actually looking at a parrot and thinking it’s a blackbird.

This is, I believe, a perspective that could successfully be implemented in the classroom. Instead of simply discussing different rhetorical practices in class, the teacher should promote a discussion where these tensions are acknowledged and actively debated by students themselves. Many of them may not even be aware that such tensions exist. So, teachers should lay the problem out in front of the students and see what type of Lego house they will build with it. In the end, the teacher should openly acknowledge that there is no one solution to this issue. Both teachers and students should be encouraged to say “I don’t know” more often and continue from there.

Teaching Writing in Portugal

This week, instead of commenting on one of the readings, I thought I would write about the practice of teaching writing in Portugal, based on a survey carried out by Prof. John Elliott at the University of Lisbon (http://ler.letras.up.pt/uploads/ficheiros/6021.pdf). For many educators, writing is still seen as the primary indicator of literacy and academic success. However, the strategies used often fall short of actually motivating students to write or developing their writing skills.

The teaching of writing in Portugal still tends to emphasize theoretical frameworks in detriment of practical activities where the student has the chance to apply what he/she has learned. Classes are still very much based on the teacher speaking and showing a set of rules and the students having to absorb them for later application in tests. Students are taught into all sorts of fictional and nonfictional genres, mostly through reading and analysis, with the sole purpose of being able to distinguish them, but not necessarily to write in them.        But what is most noticeable is the amount of attention paid to grammar as a marker of good writing. Extensive class time is spent on the explanation of grammatical rules and terminology and applying them to isolated instances (fill in the blanks type of exercises) instead of working them into the actual process of writing. The ultimate goal of teaching writing is to enable students to respond to generic prompts (often argumentative essays between 200-300 words) and succeed in exams where they are assessed for reading skills (even the teaching of reading is a problem, since students are often drilled on concepts disembodied from real text and assessment depends much more on the students’ ability to memorize and dump information on to paper than on their ability to interpret and analyze the piece of text in front of them) and grammar.

The results of Elliott’s survey of the students’ relationship with writing at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon seems to indicate that this pedagogical approach does not prepare students for academic writing or even writing in general. According to Elliott, students attach less importance to writing than to speaking and do not feel motivated to write because of the theoretical focus and the limited creative outlet. He states that “there is a world of difference between the idea and the execution of that idea” (59). In other words, students express interest in writing, but do not feel motivated to perform the written tasks for class. The survey reflects another problem: students appear to equate good writing with good grammar and the ability to follow certain conventions. When asked about their preferred mode of assessment, a majority of students replied that the most useful comments were those on grammatical correction, punctuation and spelling.

In the final part of the survey, Elliott asked students to further comment on writing and several mentioned the lack of creativity and freedom as reasons for not being interested in improving their writing. Others did not feel that they had enough skills to write (which may be attributed to the focus on surface-level issues instead of higher order concerns) and some even suggested doing more writing in class and as homework (which may indicate that there is insufficient practice).

This study suggests, then, that teachers in Portugal need to rethink their approaches to teaching writing, as they are clearly not preparing or motivating the students to the task at hand. There needs to be a bigger focus on writing as an activity that encases more than just grammar, that has a purpose other than assessment and that the student can become truly engaged in.

Hello world!

Welcome to your brand new blog at SB You: Web Publishing for You.

To get started, simply log in, edit or delete this post and check out all the other options available to you. Consider joining the Stony Brook SB You user group on Yammer.

For assistance, visit our comprehensive support site, check out our Edublogs User Guide guide or stop by The Edublogs Forums to chat with other edubloggers.

You can also subscribe to our brilliant free publication, The Edublogger, which is jammed with helpful tips, ideas and more.