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WPA-L November 2005 Part 7

‹ WPA-L November 2005 part 6 | List of November Messages

I agree entirely and can’t stress enough that we leave our preconceptions/misconceptions in the campus parking lot. Our students, regardless of their backgrounds, are steeped in cultural contexts that are above and beyond what supporting data has the ability to capture. The acquisition of high school “skills” […] say little about the potential for students to write well at the college-level—I would even go as far as to say, write brilliantly, at the college-level.

Even better is the point you make, Greg, in regard to teaching the ways in which writing works in order to change our students’ elevated expectations of themselves as writers. In my freshman composition course this semester, I have a handful of over-achieving students who, at the beginning of the semester, were convinced that their writing was perfectible the first time around, and that perhaps something was wrong with them due to their inability to move linearly through the process. Now, my students are equipped with the knowledge that the process is recursive, complex, and most importantly, part of being human.

On a final note, it is critical that we positively reinforce our students. Encouraging students to believe they are bright, capable members of the academy who stand an equal chance to succeed in written composition, tends to serve a far greater purpose than branding them as failures, with little hope, that missed the composition bus in high school. Students who are positively reinforced tend to approach writing with less ambivalence. Anyone who has been teaching composition long enough already knows that helping students get over this ambivalence is half of the battle we fight in teaching them to write well. My point once again: we leave our negative preconceptions/misconceptions in the campus parking lot.

What John is talking about here—and I think it’s extremely important—requires what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call “human objectivity” (see METAPHORS WE LIVE BY; but also Johnson’s really, really interesting MORAL IMAGINATION: IMPLICATIONS OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE FOR ETHICS).

L&J oppose “human objectivity” to both an absolutist, transcendent view (“an impossible God’s-eye-view objecitivity,” Johnson calls it [240–41]) and a completely subjectivist rejection of objectivity, an approach as unrealistic as the absolutist view. Johnson, drawing on the work of Steven Winter, defines “human objectivity” in terms of our very real ability as a species to reflect on our own biases (reflexivity; metacognition) and our ability to imagine others’ perspectives, perspectives not our own, perspectives sometimes completely alien from our own (e.g., the very stuff of some science fiction and Christian compassion, btw). Johnson defines “human objectivity,” then, as “the ability of a physically, historically, socially, and culturally situated self to reflect cricitally on its own construction of a world, and to imagine other possible worlds that might be constructed” (241).

Quoting Winter: “‘Impartiality,’ in turn, is no longer a matter of an aperspectival position, but rather an exercise of the empathetic ability to imagine what a question looks like from more than one side. ‘Situated self-consciousness,’ in this view, is a two-part process,” involving, then, (1) reflexivitiy (“the capacity to unravel or trace back the strands by which our constructions weave our world together,” qtd in Johnson, 241); and (2) transperspectivity (“the ability to imagine how the world might be constructed differently,” qtd in Johnson, 241).

When John suggests leaving our negative preconceptions in the parking lot, I think he’s suggesting we need to reflect on our own biases, identify them, and bracket them so that we can, then, imagine our students’ constructions and worlds. This process is not easy. It requires metacognition, a stepping back from our inclinations to question and test them against imagined alternatives. That might mean sitting in the parking lot a little while longer before heading in to class. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be nice to see faculty parking lots all across campus full of reflective teachers?

Jerry Nelms wrote:

Yes, I believe that when we overgeneralize from our own experiences learning to write, we miss the point that most people learning to write do not have this odd relation with words that we do. I see it more as an affliction than as a genetic gift. I suppose that for many ways that we might learn, there are propensities that people have toward those ways. Certainly we all can recall examples of the problems folks have learning analytical geometry and calculus, and yet there are those who learn it as though it were just natural. We might learn how to teach calculus to those who do not learn it easily by teaching them the same way the easy achievers were taught; I doubt that would work.

If I could get anecdotal for a moment, I have experienced what Robert describes; however, it wasn’t in regard to teaching writing, but instead with math.

Math was always my “thing” pre-college, and I was a self-declared math major as a freshman. Well, that didn’t last long for a variety of reasons and poor choices on my part, but much later, after I had been teaching writing for awhile, I had the opportunity to teach a GRE prep class. I figured it would be like an SAT verbal prep course I had taught while getting my secondary ed credential, but, horrors, those students really wanted math instruction! And, really, I had very little clue as to how I could teach them other than to have them take practice exams and then talk through their problem solving and offer tried-and-true test-taking strategies. I spent hours preparing for that class, but often I was hard-pressed to explain how someone figures out something that I knew (such as arithmetic). I can say that my old math skills certainly kicked in and was getting perfect scores on those math practice exams, but that seemed small consolation to me and none to my students.

‹ WPA-L November 2005 part 6 | List of November Messages