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Monthly Archives: March 2015


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Thein, Guise, and Sloan. Emotional Rules in Student Response. RTE, Feb. 2015. Posted 03/31/15

Thein, Amanda Haertling, Megan Guise, and DeAnn Long Sloan. “Examining Emotional Rules in the English Classroom: A Critical Discourse Analysis of One Student’s Literary Responses in Two Academic Contexts.” Research in the Teaching of English 49.3 (2015): 200-23. Print.

Amanda Haertling Thein, Megan Guise, and DeAnn Long Sloan explore the ways in which emotion inevitably pervades classroom environments and argue for more attention to how students understand the “emotional rules” of different learning situations. They focus on pedagogy in literature with a call for similar research in writing, drama, or other language-arts coursework (219).

The authors draw from a broader qualitative project a case study of a “focal” student, Nina, enrolled in Sloan’s 10th-grade course. They chose such students as examples of a diverse range of “reading interests, abilities, and levels of engagement” (205). Nina, an able student who reads widely, is studied as she engages in two learning contexts, a whole-class seminar circle discussing Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and a three-student “literature circle” focusing on Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina in which the students can interact without the direct oversight of a teacher (206). The researchers supplemented transcripts of discussion in each context with interviews with Nina. Thein, Guise, and Sloan examine Nina’s very different rhetorical choices as she responds to literature in the two different environments (205).

The authors’ focus emanates from their contention that emotion has often been theorized as an individual response that should be bracketed because it interferes with the analytical mindset necessary for true critical engagement. On the contrary, they maintain that emotion always underlies students’ construction of the proper way to respond in any given learning environment and, if ignored, can constrain the kinds of learning possible (205). They characterize the rules for incorporating emotion into academic environments and for displaying emotion as “circulating and sticking” through sociocultural processes in which people learn what is expected in each situation (203). Unless such “emotional rules” are “unstuck,” they close off certain interpretive options and allow important issues to be elided (213, 217-18).

The authors’ observations and interviews lead them to characterize Nina’s in-class responses as largely directed to Sloan as the teacher and structured to accord with the attitudes and ideologies Nina believes Sloan values. These include emotionally restrained expressions of tolerance and analytical contextualization of characters’ behavior. In contrast, in the relatively unsupervised literature-circle setting, Nina and her classmates reveal immediate, even visceral, emotional reactions to events in Bastard Out of Carolina. Drawing on the model of critical discourse analysis presented by N. Fairclough, the authors contrast these two sets of responses through examination of “genre,” “style,” and “discourse.” Genre relates to the socially transmitted emotional rules that determine appropriate emotional expression in different contexts; style allows analysis of modes of expression such as tone, voice level, use of metaphor, and phrasing. Discourse involves an account of the “themes” and “ideologies” that appear in the different environments (207-08).

Thein et al. illustrate with coded examples from transcripts and from interviews that Nina intuited “neutral” comments as acceptable within the seminar circle (212), whereas in the small-group student-led literature circle, all three students felt free to judge characters harshly, to address them by name, and even to advocate violent solutions to issues raised in the book (215). Where in the seminar circle, Nina offered her responses in a quiet “academic register,” in the literature circle she raised her voice and risked profane and politically incorrect language in a “street-smart” register that cast her as “someone powerfully able to cope with the fear and violence depicted in the novel” (215). Additionally, in their small group, the students responded to each other rather than to the teacher, as was Nina’s habit in the larger seminar circle (215).

Thein et al. note that Nina may have been drawing on emotional rules from experiences in earlier literature classes rather than accurately interpreting Sloan’s intentions (218). They consider teachers’ attention to students’ reading of such rules as crucial because of the tendency of analytical, academic registers and genres to drive such emotions underground where their implications cannot be part of the discussion. The authors contend that while emotions such as anger and a desire for violent solutions may not be “better” responses (217), they open up new interpretive opportunities that allow students a fuller exploration of their relationship to texts. For example, they argue that for Nina, the examination of varying perspectives she felt was appropriate in Sloan’s class meant trying out only certain approved perspectives; others that she expressed in the less constrained environment were inconsistent with the academic registers and discourses she saw as invited by the class (218). Teachers can help students recognize the existence of these rule sets in order to help them better investigate their responses to a range of emotionally laden situations (218).


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Dryer and Peckham. Social Context of Writing Assessment. WPA, Fall 2014. Posted 3/24/2015.

Dryer, Dylan B., and Irvin Peckham. “Social Contexts of Writing Assessment: Toward an Ecological Construct of the Rater.” WPA: Writing Program Administration 38.1 (2014): 12-41.

Dylan B. Dryer and Irvin Peckham argue for a richer understanding of the factors affecting the validity of writing assessments. A more detailed picture of how the assumptions of organizers and raters as well as the environment itself drive results can lead to more thoughtful design of assessment processes.

Drawing on Stuart MacMillan’s “model of Ecological Inquiry,” Dryer and Peckham conduct an “empirical, qualitative research study” (14), becoming participants in a large-scale assessment organized by a textbook publisher to investigate the effectiveness of the textbook. Nineteen raters including Dryer and Peckham, all experienced college-writing teachers, examined reflective pieces from the portfolios of more than 1800 composition students using the criteria of Rhetorical Knowledge; Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing; Writing Processes; and Knowledge of Conventions from the WPA Outcomes Statement 1.0 (15). In addition to scores on each of these criteria, raters assigned holistic scores that served as the primary data for Dryer and Peckham’s study. Raters were introduced to the purpose of the assessment and to the criteria and benchmark papers by a “chief reader” characterized by the textbook publisher as “a national leader in writing assessment research” (19). The room set-up consisted of four tables with three to four raters and a table leader charged with maintaining the scoring protocols presented by the chief reader. Dryer and Peckham augmented their observations and assessment data with preliminary questionnaires, interviews, exit surveys, and focus groups.

Dryer and Peckham adapted MacMillan’s four-level model by dividing the environment into “social contexts” of field, room, table, and rater (14). Field variables involved the extent to which the raters were attuned to general assumptions common to composition scholarship, such as definitions of concepts and how to prioritize the four criteria (19-22). The “room” system consisted of the expectations established by the chief reader and the degree to which raters worked within those expectations as they applied the criteria (22-24). Table-specific variables were based on the recognition that each table operated with its own microecology growing out of such components as interpersonal interactions among the raters and the interventions of the table leaders (25-30). Finally, the individual-rater system encompassed factors such as how each rater negotiated the space between his or her own responses to the process and the expectations and pressures of the field, room, and table (30-33).

Field-level findings included the observation that most of the raters agreed with the ordered ranking of the criteria that had been chosen by the WPA team that developed the outcomes (20-21). The authors maintain that the ability of their study to identify the outliers (three of seventeen raters) who considered Writing Processes and Knowledge of Conventions most important permits a sense of how widely the field’s values have spread throughout the profession (22). Collecting a complete “scoring history” for each rater, including the number of “overturned” scores, or scores that deviated from the room consensus, allowed the finding that ranking the four criteria differently from the field consensus led to a high percentage of such incorrect scores (21).

The room-level conclusions demonstrated the assumption that there actually is a “real” or correct score for each paper and that the benchmark papers adequately represent how a paper measured against the selected criteria can earn this score. This phenomenon, the authors argue, tends to pervade assessment environments (23). Raters were extolled for bringing “professional” expertise to the process (19); however, raters whose scores deviated too far from the correct score were judged “out of line” (22). Interviews and surveys reveal that raters were concerned with the fit between their own judgments and the “room” score and sometimes struggled to adjust their scores to more closely match the room consensus (e.g., 23-24).

At the table level, observations and interviews revealed the degree to which some raters’ behavior and perceived attitudes influenced other raters’ decisions (e.g., 28). Table leaders’ ability to keep the focus on the specific criteria, redirecting raters away from other, more individual criteria, affected overall table results (25-27): A comparison of the range of table scores with the overall room score enabled the authors to designate some tables as “timid,” unwilling to risk awarding high or low scores, and others as “bold,” able to assign scores across the entire 1-6 range (25). Dryer and Peckham note that some raters consciously opted for a 2 rather than a 1, for example, because they felt that the 2 would be “adjacent” to either a 1 or a 3 and thus “safe” from being declared incorrect (28).

Discussion of the rater-level social system focused on the “surprising degree” to which raters did not actually conform to the approved rubric to make their judgments (31). For example, raters responded to the writer’s perceived gender as well as to suppositions about the English program from which particular papers had been drawn (30-31). Similarly, at the table level, raters veered toward criteria not on the rubric, such as “voice” or “engagement” (24). These raters’ resistance to the room expectations showed up overtly in the exit surveys and interviews but not in the data from the assessment itself.

Dryer and Peckham recommend four adjustments to standard procedures for such assessments. First, awareness of the “ecology of scoring” can suggest protocols to head off the most likely deviations from consistent use of the rubric (33-34). Second, this same awareness can prevent overconfidence in the power of calibration and norming to disrupt individual preconceptions about what constitutes a good paper (34-35). Third, the authors recommend more opportunities to discuss the meaning and value of key terms and to air individual concerns with room and field expectations (35). Fourth, the collection of data like individual and table-level scoring as well as measures of overall and individual alignment with the field should become standard practice. Rather than undercutting the validity of assessments, the authors argue, such data would underscore the complexity of the process and accentuate the need for care and expertise both in evaluating student writing and in applying the results, heading off the assumption that writing assessment is a simple or mechanical task that can easily be outsourced (36).


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Pajares, Frank. Writing Self-Efficacy. Reading and Writing Quarterly, 2003. Posted 3/2/2015.

Pajares, Frank. “Self-Efficacy Beliefs, Motivation, and Achievement in Writing: A Review of the Literature.” Reading and Writing Quarterly 19 (2003): 139-58. Web. Educational researcher Frank Pajares of Emory University, writing in Reading and Writing Quarterly in 2003, reviews twenty years of research into Albert Bandura’s concept of “self-efficacy” as it relates to student writing. Self-efficacy, which measures one’s belief in one’s ability to complete or succeed at tasks, usually in particular areas, has been more widely studied as it affects success in mathematics and science, but Pajares reports increasing interest from language arts researchers since the 1980s as more scholars address the social and emotional aspects of writing (141-42). Findings indicate that self-efficacy, more than any other source of motivation, influences career choices and predicts success at writing, influencing such contributors to overall success as willingness to take on new, challenging tasks; willingness to persevere despite obstacles or failure; and ability to enjoy or value an activity (140). In fact, Pajares reports, individuals’ confidence in their abilities to succeed at a task may more strongly affect whether or not they succeed than their actual competence level (153). People acquire their self-beliefs from four sources: their sense of previously having “mastered” similar tasks; comparisons of their successes with those of others; their perceptions of others’ judgments about their abilities; and their experiences of stress or anxiety in relation to the task (140-41). Pajares cites findings that other kinds of self-belief that are commonly seen as components of motivation become “non-significant” when self-efficacy is included as a variable. These include writing apprehension; the student’s view of writing as a valuable activity; the student’s view of him- or herself as able to “self-regulate” by self-monitoring and independently adopting strategies for improvement; “self-concept,” a more generalized perception of one’s overall “self-worth”; and “achievement goals,” which capture why students want to succeed, such as intrinsic satisfaction from learning itself rather than a desire for the extrinsic satisfaction of being judged favorably by others (146-48). In other words, these factors may be a result of the individual’s level of self-efficacy rather than contributors to it. Only “preperformance assessment”—a measure of such factors as writing aptitude and prior success—equals self-efficacy as a predictor of writing success (148), and Pajares points to evidence that aptitude and prior success themselves are most likely the products of self-efficacy, so that measures of preperformance are in fact indirect measures of self-efficacy (145). Research indicates that self-efficacy in writing is most often assessed in three ways: as confidence in one’s mastery of particular skills, like punctuation and grammar; as confidence in one’s ability to complete a specific task, like write an essay; or confidence that one can earn a particular grade in a language-arts class (143-44). People hold differing self-efficacy beliefs depending on the task being undertaken; reporting Bandura’s guidelines for effectively evaluating the effects of self-efficacy on success at a task, Pajares cautions that the self-efficacy measures must correspond to the actual task to be assessed, that is, if the outcome is a task like a successful essay, the self-efficacy features to be examined must be those involved in actually producing an essay, not more basic skills such as handwriting competence or mechanics (142). According to Pajares’s review, findings on gender differences are mixed. Girls in lower grades tend to have more confidence in their writing than boys, but by middle school, even though girls believe they write better than boys, they no longer score higher on self-efficacy. Pajares reports speculation that at higher grades, school becomes more masculinized, affecting girls’ attitudes (148-49). Some researchers also posit that girls are less likely to express confidence because they have absorbed a “feminine orientation” that discourages boastfulness (149). Others suggest that girls think they write better than boys because writing, in contrast to math and science, is categorized as a component of a feminine orientation. Pajares reports findings that “gender differences in academic motivation may in part be accounted for by differences in the beliefs that students hold about their gender rather than by their gender per se” (150). Pajares finds less authoritative research on writing self-efficacy in minority students (151-52). Studies find that Hispanic students have lower self-efficacy with regard to their writing than non-Hispanic Whites; this was not the case with regard to math. Pajares raises the possibility that “entrenched, negative perceptions of one’s ability” may impede minority students in academic settings (151). He notes the need for broader research to follow up on these questions. In general, teachers must be aware of the power of self-efficacy beliefs to promote or derail learning. Research suggests that students’ efficacy beliefs about their abilities as writers declines as they progress through school, which further suggests that self-confidence may not be given its due as a factor in ongoing success (152). Efforts to break learning down into challenging tasks that students can succeed at and awareness of the impact of adults’ judgments on students’ self-confidence can prevent negative beliefs from limiting academic achievement (153). Significantly, according to Pajares, efforts to address such affective factors as writing anxiety will not improve outcomes unless the larger construct of overall writing self-efficacy is emphasized (146).


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Pigg, Stacey. Mobile Composing Habits. CCC 12/14. Posted 3/2/2015.

Pigg, Stacey. “Emplacing Mobile Composing Habits: A Study of Academic Writing in Networked Social Space.” College Composition and Communication 66.2 (2014): 250-75. Print.

Stacey Pigg reports on an ethnographic case study of student “composing habits” (257) as they use technology to pursue their academic work in public spaces. Pigg observed activity at two spaces, a Wi-Fi-equipped off-campus café and an on-campus “Technology Commons” (258-59). Observations were followed by interviews of twenty-one students with diverse majors and at different academic levels; interviews and video-recordings of their processes were transcribed and coded (257). Pigg presents two of her participants in detail, one at the café and one at the commons.

Pigg’s study emphasizes the material aspects of such use of social space to accomplish focused work outside of the classroom. She argues that all students need an external space where they can distance themselves from distractions such as TV, pets, and family and extend their classroom learning, thereby bolstering the academic state of mind that leads to success (270). She explores how the use of public spaces by the two students she features allows them to develop work and mental habits that support their academic goals.

Pigg reviews research that argues that technology has changed the relationship between people and space. Technology expands space by making available knowledge and contacts outside of the immediate surroundings. It also enables control of space by making it possible to use varied spaces as “sites of academic learning” (252), and by providing means of limiting access to social interactions, as public places become specifically adapted to individuals’ focus on their screens. In such spaces, writers can choose their desired degree of social interaction as well as interaction with their devices.

Pigg is concerned that lack of access to spaces outside of the classroom where learning can take place will disrupt the “stability” of a student’s academic experience and degrade “persistence,” which the WPA Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing establishes as key to academic success (269-70). The harder it is for students to continue their learning outside the classroom, the less exposure they experience to the learning strategies Pigg identifies in the two subjects she portrays in detail.

For example, writing and learning, as embodied processes, become associated with memory and imbued with personal resonance: the extended extracurricular engagement with classroom material allowed by the two students’ merging of public spaces with the virtual access enabled by their computers and other devices encourages increased time on task as well as the use of virtual locations like an outline template to insert information into personally meaningful frameworks (263, 268). The two students’ preferred spaces allow the creation of routines that enhance productive “stability” (267) as “they returned to familiar places that had yielded positive results over time” (263).

Pigg emphasizes that her two subjects are not necessarily typical (269); rather, they illustrate how materiality can become an active force in learning, as the material components of scenes in which writing takes place assume an “agentive” function, playing a role in how the writing unfolds (255). Simply urging students to develop study and time-management skills is inadequate when material conditions do not lend themselves to the kinds of learning strategies that make use of the new configuration of space enabled by technology (270). Factors such as a good laptop and easy physical access to spaces outside of the classroom privilege those who have them. Moreover, such spaces need to be not only physically easy to access, but also psychically available, because not all spaces are equally welcoming to all students (262). Writers must be able to appropriate space to accommodate notebooks, books, and computers (268). Environments where studying is the norm also facilitate academic focus (260).

Pigg contends that most scholarship of writing processes has addressed the cognitive, internal aspects of composing and the effects of the devices themselves (254, 268); the effects of student processes may visible, but with the changing landscape, the processes themselves may be lost (271). She argues that increased study of how the negotiation of space and technology interacts with literacy practices can enable compositionists to become more active in efforts to construct appropriate spaces where all students can establish a fruitful version of what Kazys Varnelis and Anne Friedburg call a “mobile sense of place” (qtd. in Pigg 253, 270-71).


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Hum, Sue. Racialized Gaze, Design. CE, 1/15. Posted 3/2/2015.

Hum, Sue. “‘Between the Eyes’: The Racialized Gaze as Design.” College English 77.3 (2015): 191-215. Print.

Sue Hum, associate professor of English at the University of Texas, San Antonio, examines the 19th-century political cartoons of Thomas Nast to argue that the assumptions, ideologies, stereotypes, and received knowledge of our social, cultural, and political environments constitute a “lifeworld” that inescapably influences our choices in designing visual messages. She focuses on the “racialized gaze” that, she contends, as one of the “habits of looking” (191) to which all design is subject, undercuts Nast’s efforts to ameliorate anti-immigrant attitudes and legislation directed at Chinese populations from the mid-1800s well into the 20th century. Her exploration of Nast’s activist visual rhetoric leads to a call for teachers and scholars involved in the analysis and production of visual rhetoric, particularly as it becomes a focus in English Studies classrooms, to become more alert to the degree to which the readily “available resources” provided by our “lifeworld” direct and constrain our choices in design (197-99).

Hum develops her argument along two axes. The first involves the “characteristics” of “sight” and “site,” which she sees functioning as verbs. Sight as a verb results in the use of visible markers to stand in for a range of judgments about the nature of an individual; visible characteristics take on the power of “facticity,” informing us of supposed truths about a person based solely on what she looks like (194-5, 199-201). “Site” uses these visible markers to incorporate individuals into a “homogenous group” that can then be located in an extant social and cultural hierarchy (195, 202-3).

The second axis is that of the “dynamics” of “authenticity” and “universality,” which Hum sees acting as nouns. Authenticity requires the use of visual detail to represent individuals in the ways that the contemporaneous culture views as accurate representations (195-96, 203-04). For example, Nast used elaborate, stereotypical indications such as flowing robes and long queues to establish the ethnicity of his Chinese subjects. Universality involves depictions that attempt to establish the shared humanity of different groups, for example, by attempting to evoke sympathy for the anguish felt by a bullied “coolie” in an 1869 cartoon (196, 205-08). This attempt to subsume specific cultures by incorporating them into the conception promoted by the dominant social order of what it means to be a fellow human, Hum contends, “elides the lived experiences of people of color by overlooking how differences are produced by histories of oppression and ideologies of exclusion” (196). Hum argues that these two dynamics function both simultaneously and at odds with each other. The care Nast took to mark his subjects as Chinese rendered them inescapably alien even as he hoped to show their commonality with the culture that characterized them as the “yellow peril” and a dangerous “horde” (195, 206, 204)

Thus, Hum writes, the “racialized gaze” invests the visible with the power of a truth that is in fact a product of the culture’s readily available beliefs and expectations. It focuses on markers of difference as statements about individuals and groups and in doing so, reinforces extant hierarchies and divisions even when meant to challenge them. Hum’s closing suggests that awareness of such tendencies can temper their power and urges scholars and teachers in English Studies to cultivate such awareness in the examination and production of visual rhetoric: “This historical inquiry offers students an understanding of the broad array of contextual decisions involved in producing images” and “highlights how well-intentioned designers, as a result of the perceptual habits of their time, may be blind to the ideological grammar, structures, and conventions of their lifeworlds. . . .” (210).