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Category Archives: Motivation


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King, Emily. Student Silence in Classroom Discussion. TETYC, Mar. 2018. Posted 03/21/2018.

King, Emily. “Understanding Classroom Silence: How Students’ Perceptions of Power Influence Participation in Discussion-Based Composition Classrooms.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 45.3 (2018): 284-305. Web. 16 Mar. 2018.

Emily King conducted a qualitative study of students’ willingness to participate in discussions in writing classrooms. She finds such exchanges essential in critical pedagogy, which, she contends, requires collaborative, dialogic engagement in order to raise student awareness of inequities and power structures “in the classroom and beyond” (284). In particular, she addresses how students’ perceptions of power differentials may influence their willingness to take part in discussion.

King reviews several decades of scholarship on student participation in critical classrooms to reveal hypotheses about the reasons students may or may not choose to speak during class. She cites scholars like Ira Shor, Paulo Freire, and Patricia Bizzell to propose that students often conclude, in Shor’s words, that their job is to “answer questions, not question answers” (qtd. in King 285), and that teachers’ efforts to make the classroom more democratic only arouse students’ suspicions because they perceive that the teacher will always retain power (285).

Other scholars reviewed by King find an explanation in students’ efforts to differentiate their identities from the institutional ones they find imposed when they enter college (285). Russel K. Durst posits that students resist the degree to which critical exploration “complicate[s] rather than simplify[ies]” the lives of students who simply want to see writing as an instrumental means to a goal (qtd. in King 286). King argues that all these explanations revolve around student responses to power relationships and that attention to this question can enhance teachers’ ability to further critical curricula (286).

The study employed “gateway research,” a six-step method related to oral history created by Carolyn Lunsford Mears. Based on interpretation of interview data, the method allows researchers to explore “students’ individual narratives” to understand how they respond to experience (288). King observed a colleague’s first-year writing class for two weeks, taking notes on student participation, and distributed an anonymous questionnaire to several sections, eliciting 75 responses. She conducted in-depth interviews with four students from her own and her colleague’s courses (288-89). King maintains that comparing survey and interview results yielded an informative picture of student attitudes (290).

King found that 43% of the students surveyed said they “seldom participate in class discussion,” while 35% classified themselves as “moderate” participants. Only 23% claimed to speak often (291-92). In King’s own observations of the students in her class and in the class she observed, students participated even less than their survey data indicated, with only 36% of the students falling into the “high” and “moderate” categories (292).

In both the interviews and the surveys, students insisted that “social difference” (292) had no effect on their participation while revealing in comments that they were very aware of issues of race, class, and gender (292-94):

[T]he interviewees spoke freely about social difference and injustice in the world and even on campus but were adamant about the lack of connection between those judgments and their own classroom behavior. (293).

King contends that students appeared to see the teacher’s fairness or lack of bias as the primary guarantor of equality in the classroom (294).

Examining her data on motivation for classroom choices, King finds that despite denying the influence of power and social difference, students are both aware of these components of classroom behavior and work actively to respond to them. King argues that many participation choices are not connected to learning but rather to efforts to “manage reputation” and “alter or affirm social identity” in response to pressures from class, gender, and race (295).

Particularly salient, in King’s view, was the association in students’ comments between speaking in class and appearing intelligent. The two female students, who were the most vocal, noted that classmates often spoke because “they ‘wanted to seem smart’ but really ‘had nothing to say’” (296), while in one case, in King’s representation, the student specifically wanted to appear smart and engaged because “she did not believe [these traits] were generally associated with Hispanic students” (296).

Similarly, the less communicative males King interviewed expressed concerns about appearing less intelligent; in one case the student “was very concerned about racial stereotypes against which he believed he was constantly working, even within his own family” (297). Comments quoted by King indicate he wanted to participate more but “I don’t want to seem like I’m dumb” (qtd. in King 297). This same student indicated concerns about other students’ perceptions about his social class (297).

The other male student exhibited characteristics of what Ira Shor calls “Siberian Syndrome,” casting himself as a “listener” who sat on the periphery in class (298). According to King, this student’s choices indicated an awareness that “his contributions to class discussions would be judged by his peers” (298).

King writes that the two women’s choices allowed them to establish power in the classroom (299). These women connected their classroom behavior to their personas outside the classroom, with one stating that she was a “natural leader” (qtd. in King 299). Their roles included a sense that students had a responsibility to the class and that part of their role was to “maintain” conversations the teacher had started (299). In addition, these women suggested that such a sense of leadership and group responsibility was a gendered trait (297).

These observations lead King to note that while teachers value active participation, “very talkative students” may be motivated more by a desire to be noticed than by learning and that they may stifle contributions from less vocal classmates (299). She presents interview data from one male interviewee suggesting that he did feel silenced when other students dominated the conversation (298). King writes that this reaction may be particularly prevalent in students who struggle with “Imposter Syndrome,” doubting that they actually belong in college (300).

King notes that her study may be limited by the effect on her objectivity of her involvement as researcher and by ambiguities in the definitions of words like “power” and “participation” (301). She contends that her research offers a “different lens” with which to examine student resistance to engagement in critical classrooms because of its focus on student responses (301). Her study leads her to conclude that students are alert to power issues that arise from social difference and often manage their responses to these issues without teacher intervention, even when they actively deny the influence of difference (302).

King urges more attention to student voices through qualitative research to determine how teachers can effectively develop their own roles as facilitators and co-learners in critically informed classrooms (302).


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Limpo and Alves. Effects of Beliefs about “Writing Skill Malleability” on Performance. JoWR 2017. Posted 11/24/2017.

Limpo, Teresa, and Rui A. Alves. “Relating Beliefs in Writing Skill Malleability to Writing Performance: The Mediating Roles of Achievement Goals and Self-Efficacy.” Journal of Writing Research 9.2 (2017): 97-125. Web. 15 Nov. 2017.

Teresa Limpo and Rui A. Alves discuss a study with Portuguese students designed to investigate pathways between students’ beliefs about writing ability and actual writing performance. They use measures for achievement goals and self-efficacy to determine how these factors mediate between beliefs and performance. Their study goals involved both exploring these relationships and assessing the validity and reliability of the instruments and theoretical models they use (101-02).

The authors base their approach on the assumption that people operate via “implicit theories,” and that central to learning are theories that see “ability” as either “incremental,” in that skills can be honed through effort, or as an “entity” that cannot be improved despite effort (98). Limpo and Alves argue that too little research has addressed how these beliefs about “writing skill malleability” influence learning in the specific “domain” of writing (98).

The authors report earlier research that indicates that students who see writing as an incremental skill perform better in intervention studies. They contend that the “mechanisms” through which this effect occurs have not been thoroughly examined (99).

Limpo and Alves apply a three-part model of achievement goals: “mastery” goals involve the desire to improve and increase competence; “performance-approach” goals involve the desire to do better than others in the quest for competence; and “performance-avoidance” goals manifest as the desire to avoid looking incompetent or worse than others (99-100). Mastery and performance-approach goals correlate positively because they address increased competence, but performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals also correlate because they both concern how learners see themselves in comparison to others (100).

The authors write that “there is overall agreement” among researchers in this field that these goals affect performance. Students with mastery goals display “mastery-oriented learning patterns” such as “use of deep strategies, self-regulation, effort and persistence, . . . [and] positive affect,” while students who focus on performance avoidance exhibit “helpless learning patterns” including “unwillingness to seek help, test anxiety, [and] negative affect” (100-01). Student outcomes with respect to performance-approach goals were less clear (101). The authors hope to clarify the role of self-efficacy in these goal choices and outcomes (101).

Limpo and Alves find that self-efficacy is “perhaps the most studied variable” in examinations of motivation in writing (101). They refer to a three-part model: self-efficacy for “conventions,” or “translating ideas into linguistic forms and transcribing them into writing”; for “ideation,” finding ideas and organizing them, and for “self-regulation,” which involves knowing how to make the most of “the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects of writing” (101). They report associations between self-efficacy, especially for self-regulation, and mastery goals (102). Self-efficacy, particularly for conventions, has been found to be “among the strongest predictors of writing performance” (102).

The authors predicted several “paths” that would illuminate the ways in which achievement goals and self-efficacy linked malleability beliefs and performance. They argue that their study contributes new knowledge by providing empirical data about the role of malleability beliefs in writing (103).

The study was conducted among native Portuguese speakers in 7th and 8th grades in a “public cluster of schools in Porto” that is representative of the national population (104). Students received writing instruction only in their Portuguese language courses, in which teachers were encouraged to use “a process-oriented approach” to teach a range of genres but were not given extensive pedagogical support or the resources to provide a great deal of “individualized feedback” (105).

The study reported in this article was part of a larger study; for the relevant activities, students first completed scales to measure their beliefs about writing-skill malleability and to assess their achievement goals. They were then given one of two prompts for “an opinion essay” on whether students should have daily homework or extra curricular activities (106). After the prompts were provided, students filled out a sixteen-item measure of self-efficacy for conventions, ideation, and self-regulation. A three-minute opportunity to brainstorm about their responses to the prompts followed; students then wrote a five-minute “essay,” which was assessed as a measure of performance by graduate research assistants who had been trained to use a “holistic rating rubric.” Student essays were typed and mechanical errors corrected. The authors contend that the use of such five-minute tasks has been shown to be valid (107).

The researchers predicted that they would see correlations between malleability beliefs and performance; they expected to see beliefs affect goals, which would affect self-efficacy, and lead to differences in performance (115). They found these associations for mastery goals. Students who saw writing as an incremental, improvable skill displayed “a greater orientation toward mastery goals” (115). The authors state that this result for writing had not been previously demonstrated. Their research reveals that “mastery goals contributed to students’ confidence” and therefore to self-efficacy, perhaps because students with this belief “ actively strive” for success (115).

They note, however, that prior research correlated these results with self-efficacy for conventions, whereas their study showed that self-efficacy for self-regulation, students’ belief that “they can take control of their own writing,” was the more important contributor to performance (116); in fact, it was “the only variable directly influencing writing performance” (116). Limpo and Alves hypothesize that conventions appeared less central in their study because the essays had been typed and corrected, so that errors had less effect on performance scores (116).

Data on the relationship between malleability beliefs and performance-approach or performance-avoidance goals, the goals associated with success in relation to others, were “less clear-cut” (117). Students who saw skills as fixed tended toward performance-avoidance, but neither type of performance goal affected self-efficacy.

Limpo and Alves recount an unexpected finding that the choice of performance-avoidance goals did not affect performance scores on the essays (117). The authors hypothesize that the low-stakes nature of the task and its simplicity did not elicit “the self-protective responses” that often hinder writers who tend toward these avoidance goals (117). These unclear results lead Limpo and Alves to withhold judgment about the relationship among these two kinds of goals, self-efficacy, and performance, positing that other factors not captured in the study might be involved (117-18).

They recommend more extensive research with more complex writing tasks and environments, including longitudinal studies and consideration of such factors as “past performance” and gender (118). They encourage instructors to foster a view of writing as an incremental skill and to emphasize self-regulation strategies. They recommend “The Self-Regulated Strategy Development model” as “one of the most effective instructional models for teaching writing” (119).


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Krzus-Shaw, Kassia. Service-Learning for Community College Students. May TETYC. Posted 06/09/2017.

Krzus-Shaw, Kassia. “Bridging Gaps and Creating Rich Service-Learning Experiences for Marginalized Students.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 44.4 (2017): 351-71. Web. 27 May 2017.

Kassia Krzus-Shaw argues that service-learning research has not adequately addressed the ways in which students from community colleges experience service-learning. Using her own practices teaching a service-learning component in a composition class at a two-year institution, Krzus-Shaw discusses how her students’ identities as members of the community they were expected to serve affected their learning and their engagement within an academic environment.

Previous research, Krzus-Shaw contends, generally addresses the “immersion” model in which privileged college students, usually white, enter very different cultural environments (353). Research that does consider students with different ethnic and cultural identities, she writes, has attempted to focus on individual identity groups, while in her experience, community-college students are likely to exhibit many different overlapping identities (352).

Krzus-Shaw presents her teaching model as an exploration of how these overlapping identities complicate service-learning when the culture the students serve is their own. She notes that her study must be considered “anecdotal” because, as contingent faculty, she had no “access to the IRB process, or other institutional supports” and thus could not present data such as student writing (355).

Within such community-college contexts, Krzus-Shaw argues, service learning can address marginalized students’ struggles with embracing an academic identity that confers authority and expertise, develops rhetorical awareness and agency, and encourages commitment to academic and professional contexts (353). This focus, Krzus-Shaw reports, differs from that of more traditional service-learning models in that traditionally, students are assumed to develop academic authority as a result of the service experience; in her class, students needed to begin embracing their identity as analysts and researchers before entering the service-learning environment (357). Unlike students in traditional service-learning courses, her students did not need time to become acquainted with the new culture but “already were experts on the lived social experience embodied by the service sites” (357). The new perspectives marginalized students encountered as they did service work within their communities were the views of themselves as scholar-researchers with “the academic identity to contextualize their experiences in a way that the academy recognizes as rhetorically exigent” (357).

Krzus-Shaw used a “bridge model” as “scaffolding” for her students’ service experiences (355-56). One element of this model in designing service-learning curricula is “flexibility,” for example as a criterion for the sites where the service will take place. Krzus-Shaw emphasizes that for these students, transportation and child care can prevent participation and commitment; her most effective site was within walking distance of the classroom, family-friendly, and bilingual (356).

Also central to the bridge model’s focus on agency, Krzus-Shaw writes, is the decision to make participation optional. She reports that her course outcomes and materials were pre-determined by her program, and that she was probably the only instructor to build a service-learning component into the preset course design (356). Making the service-learning unit optional made it easier for students to feel “ownership” of their choice to participate (357).

Krzus-Shaw writes that she found it possible to build her service-learning model on her department’s focus on “genre; the composition process; and rhetorical awareness” by assigning, first, a narrative “locating their rhetorical voice within their community” (357), followed by an analysis on some aspect of “community action” (357). The class moved on to writing “reports” about visits to the classroom by people active at the sites (357). These visits provided students with role models and mentors as well as contact points for the upcoming service component (358).

Students could then choose one of two tracks for their argument and research papers, either on issues related to the service site itself or on issues related to “community-based problems” to which they proposed solutions (358). Work by students writing for the service site was used to “create new public initiatives and to apply for new grants” (358). Krzus-Shaw writes that awareness that their writing would actually be used inspired students with an increased sense of audience, with subsequent effects on the amount and quality of revision as well as engagement both in the classroom and in the community (360).

Important components of the “pedagogical bridge” involved in service learning, in Krzus-Shaw’s view, are “observation and journaling” prior to developing formal research papers using secondary sources (359-60). In her view, it was during this process that students were able to “negotiate their personal identity with that of the organization, the community, and with the student-scholar role they’re being asked to engage” (359). This negotiation, she writes, contributes greatly to transfer, as students carry these identities forward into future academic, civic, and professional environments.

Krzus-Shaw reports that reflection further enhanced the identity transformation that resulted from becoming leaders and authorities within their own communities. Reflection allowed students to process “shock” at the level of problems faced by members of communities where they themselves were “living within those statistics” (361). Reflection, she contends, allowed them to recognize how systemic factors influence individual lives at the same time that it encouraged them to see how effective rhetorical action could make a difference (361) as they began “reaching for new ways of interacting with their world” (362).

Fifty percent of students in the last of the three semesters during which Krzus-Shaw taught the unit opted to participate, and two students in particular continued working with the participant organizations, noting that the experience “changed their life trajectory” with regard to career choices and confidence in their rhetorical agency (363).

Krzus-Shaw argues for more formal longitudinal studies of students from marginalized communities who undertook service-learning roles in those same communities (364). Such studies could validate her findings, which she contends were necessarily limited by her position as contingent faculty despite encouragement from her institution. First-year writing students, she maintains, are among those who would most benefit from the identity transformation that service-learning can enable (365), yet those students are most likely to be taught by part-time faculty who are burdened by their own economic status and workloads, as well as by being excluded from the formal support needed to design and implement service-learning initiatives (365-66).

She points to the “civic engagement statements” included in the mission statements of many two-year institutions as grounds for providing more support for service-learning in these environments. Meanwhile, she writes, instructors in these colleges can institute “small steps” in service-learning that, over time, can establish networks and practices that ease the workload involved (366-67). For students who become involved in service-learning within their communities, she states, “there is an aspect of service-learning on the student level that sustains itself well beyond our liminal role as professors” (367).


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Litterio, Lisa M. Contract Grading: A Case Study. J of Writing Assessment, 2016. Posted 04/20/2017.

Litterio, Lisa M. “Contract Grading in a Technical Writing Classroom: A Case Study.” Journal of Writing Assessment 9.2 (2016). Web. 05 Apr. 2017.

In an online issue of the Journal of Writing Assessment, Lisa M. Litterio, who characterizes herself as “a new instructor of technical writing,” discusses her experience implementing a contract grading system in a technical writing class at a state university in the northeast. Her “exploratory study” was intended to examine student attitudes toward the contract-grading process, with a particular focus on how the method affected their understanding of “quality” in technical documents.

Litterio’s research into contract grading suggests that it can have the effect of supporting a process approach to writing as students consider the elements that contribute to an “excellent” response to an assignment. Moreover, Litterio contends, because it creates a more democratic classroom environment and empowers students to take charge of their writing, contract grading also supports critical pedagogy in the Freirean model. Litterio draws on research to support the additional claim that contract grading “mimic[s] professional practices” in that “negotiating and renegotiating a document” as students do in contracting for grades is a practice that “extends beyond the classroom into a workplace environment.”

Much of the research she reports dates to the 1970s and 1980s, often reflecting work in speech communication, but she cites as well models from Ira Shor, Jane Danielewicz and Peter Elbow, and Asao Inoue from the 2000s. In a common model, students can negotiate the quantity of work that must be done to earn a particular grade, but the instructor retains the right to assess quality and to assign the final grade. Litterio depicts her own implementation as a departure from some of these models in that she did make the final assessment, but applied criteria devised collaboratively by the students; moreover, her study differs from earlier reports of contract grading in that it focuses on the students’ attitudes toward the process.

Her Fall 2014 course, which she characterizes as a service course, enrolled twenty juniors and seniors representing seven majors. Neither Litterio nor any of the students were familiar with contract grading, and no students withdrew on learning from the syllabus and class announcements of Litterio’s grading intentions. At mid-semester and again at the end of the course, Litterio administered an anonymous open-ended survey to document student responses. Adopting the role of “teacher-researcher,” Litterio hoped to learn whether involvement in the generation of criteria led students to a deeper awareness of the rhetorical nature of their projects, as well as to “more involvement in the grading process and more of an understanding of principles discussed in technical writing, such as usability and document design.”

Litterio shares the contract options, which allowed students to agree to produce a stated number of assignments of either “excellent,” “great,” or “good” quality, an “entirely positive grading schema” that draws on Frances Zak’s claim that positive evaluations improved student “authority over their writing.”

The criteria for each assignment were developed in class discussion through an open voting process that resulted in general, if not absolute, agreement. Litterio provides the class-generated criteria for a resumé, which included length, format, and the expectations of “specific and strong verbs.” As the instructor, Litterio ultimately decided whether these criteria were met.

Mid-semester surveys indicated that students were evenly split in their preferences for traditional grading models versus the contract-grading model being applied. At the end of the semester, 15 of the 20 students expressed a preference for traditional grading.

Litterio coded the survey responses and discovered specific areas of resistance. First, some students cited the unfamiliarity of the contract model, which made it harder for them to “track [their] own grades,” in one student’s words. Second, the students noted that the instructor’s role in applying the criteria did not differ appreciably from instructors’ traditional role as it retained the “bias and subjectivity” the students associated with a single person’s definition of terms like “strong language.” Students wrote that “[i]t doesn’t really make a difference in the end grade anyway, so it doesn’t push people to work harder,” and “it appears more like traditional grading where [the teacher] decide[s], not us.”

In addition, students resisted seeing themselves and their peers as qualified to generate valid criteria and to offer feedback on developing drafts. Students wrote of the desire for “more input from you vs. the class,” their sense that student-generated criteria were merely “cosmetics,” and their discomfort with “autonomy.” Litterio attributes this resistance to the role of expertise to students’ actual novice status as well as to the nature of the course, which required students to write for different discourse communities because of their differing majors. She suggests that contract grading may be more appropriate for writing courses within majors, in which students may be more familiar with the specific nature of writing in a particular discipline.

However, students did confirm that the process of generating criteria made them more aware of the elements involved in producing exemplary documents in the different genres. Incorporating student input into the assessment process, Litterio believes, allows instructors to be more reflective about the nature of assessment in general, including the risk of creating a “yes or no . . . dichotomy that did not allow for the discussions and subjectivity” involved in applying a criterion. Engaging students throughout the assessment process, she contends, provides them with more agency and more opportunity to understand how assessment works. Student comments reflect an appreciation of having a “voice.”

This study, Litterio contends, challenges the assumption that contract grading is necessarily “more egalitarian, positive, [and] student-centered.” The process can still strike students as biased and based entirely on the instructor’s perspective, she found. She argues that the reflection on the relationship between student and teacher roles enabled by contract grading can lead students to a deeper understanding of “collective norms and contexts of their actions as they enter into the professional world.”


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Goldblatt, Eli. Expressivism as “Tacit Tradition.” CCC, Feb. 2017. Posted 03/15/2017.

Goldblatt, Eli. “Don’t Call It Expressivism: Legacies of a ‘Tacit Tradition’.” College Composition and Communication 68.3 (2017): 438-65. Print.

Eli Goldblatt explores what he considers the “subtle legacies” (442) of a “much maligned movement” in composition studies, expressivism (439). His locates his exigency in conversations about the value of a “literacy autobiography” he recently published. These discussions led him to believe that this form of writing did not meet his colleagues’ definition of respectable academic work (438-39).

For Goldblatt, expressivist tendencies may be rejected by theorists but persist in much recent work in the field, creating what Christopher Burnham and Rebecca Powell call a “tacit tradition” within the field (qtd. in Goldblatt 440). Goldblatt argues that recognizing the value and influence of expression will lead to a sense of writing that more fully integrates important aspects of what actually inspires writers.

Graduate students, he reports, often learn about expressivism via the scholarly debate between David Bartholomae and Peter Elbow in 1989 and 1991; such theoretical work cast personal expression as too grounded in the individual and “lacking in a political analysis of the composing situation in schools” (440).

Yet, Goldblatt observes, students often prefer “personal writing,” which they may consider “relatable” (439); his graduate students exhibit interest in the role of the personal in literacy activities in their own research (440). He posits, with Burnham and Powell, that the research from the 1970s by James Britton and his associates reveals “some sort of Ur-expressive drive [that] stands behind all writing” (440).

Goldblatt traces overt strands of expressivism through the work of such scholars as Sherrie Gradin and Wendy Bishop (440-41). He posits that some resistance to expressivism in composition may be traceable to concerns about the kind of research that would lead to tenure and promotion as the field began to define itself within departments heavily populated by literary critics (445). He notes “two stigmas” attached to expressivism: one is its centrality to high-school pedagogy; in its effort to establish itself as a respectable college-level endeavor, composition distanced itself from methods practiced in K-12 (446). Similarly, the field set itself apart from creative writing, in which, Goldplatt recounts, instruction in his experience emphasized “aesthetic achievement rather than self-actualization” (447).

Wendy Bishop, who characterized herself as “something-like-an-expressivist” (qtd. in Goldblatt 448), subsequently became CCCC chair. Goldblatt notes her defense of her pedagogy against the claim that expressivism

keep[s] students in a state of naiveté, [doesn’t] prepare them for the languages of  the academy, . . . and “emphasize[s] a type of self-actualization which the outside world would indict as sentimental and dangerous.” (Bishop, qtd. in Goldblatt 447-48; quoting from Stephen M. Fishman and Lucille Parkinson McCarthy)

Still, Goldblatt contends, her stance was “more admired than imitated” (448), doing little to recuperate expressivism within the field.

Despite his own commitment to poetry, Goldblatt acknowledges the importance of composition’s “social turn” and the power of the “social-epistemic rhetoric” promulgated by James Berlin and others. Still, he finds the rejection of expressivism problematic in recent movements in college writing such as the focus on transfer and the “writing about writing” program advocated by scholars like Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Goldblatt worries that too much emphasis on “school success and professional preparation” (441) undercuts “two  impulses” that he posits underlie the need to write: “the desire to speak out of your most intimate experiences and to connect with communities in need” (442).

Goldblatt examines “habits of mind” that he associates with expressivism in the recent work of four scholars who, he believes, would not explicitly call themselves expressivists (443). In Goldblatt’s view, Robert Yagelski’s Writing as a Way of Being “seems both anchored in and estranged from expressivism” (448). Yagelski’s focus on “the ‘writer writing’ rather than the ‘writer’s writing’” seems to Goldblatt a “phenomenological” approach to composing (448) that values the social impact of relationships at the same time it encourages individual self-actualization (448). Goldblatt compares Yagelski’s views to Ken Macrorie’s in his 1970 book Uptaught in that both reject “standardized instruction” in favor of “writing as a means to explore and enrich experience” (450), undoing a “false binary” between writing for the self and writing to engage with the world (448).

In Adam Banks’s Digital Griots, Goldblatt finds the personal entering through voice and style that both invoke the African-American tradition while “consciously modeling that social boundaries everywhere must be crossed” (451). Banks recounts “personal testimony” from young African Americans for whom individual storytelling establishes solidarity while creating connections with the past (452). Goldblatt notes that unlike early expressivists, Banks rejects the sense that “all expression is drawn from the same well” (453). Instead, he “remixes” many different individual voices to generate an implicit expressivism as “a deep and dialogic commitment to the individual within the swirl of events, movements, and economic pressures” (453-54).

Tiffany Rousculp’s Rhetoric of Respect recounts her creation and administration of the Community Writing Center at Salt Lake City Community College (454). Goldblatt finds Rousculp addressing tensions between progressive Freirean motives and her recognition that community members from a wide range of backgrounds would have personal reasons for writing that did not accord with the specific goals of the “sponsoring institution” (455). Although honoring these individual goals may seem antithetical to a social-epistemic approach, Goldblatt writes that the Center’s orientation remained deeply social because, in his view of Rousculp’s understanding, “individuals can only be seen within the web of their relationships to others” (456). Only when able to escape the constraints of the various institutions controliing their lives and select their own reasons for writing, Goldblatt posits, can individuals “exert agency” (456).

Sondra Perl’s On Austrian Soil depicts a teaching experience in which she worked with native Austrian writers to explore the legacy of the country’s Nazi past. Stating that he connects Perl not so much with early expressivism as with the origins of the process movement (458), Goldblatt notes her interest in the “personal, even bodily, experience of composing” (457). In his view, her experience in Austria, though painful in many ways, highlights the ways in which students’ emotional positioning, which can both inspire and limit their ability to write, must often become a teacher’s focus (458). Moreover, Goldblatt stresses, the learning both for individuals and the group arose from the shared emotions, as Perl connects what she called each student’s “wonderful uniqueness” (qtd. in Goldblatt 459) with “the socially oriented responsibility” of ethical behavior (459).

Goldblatt hopes for an understanding within composition of how a sophisticated approach to expressivism can infuse writing with the “intentionality, joy, seriousness, and intimacy available in the act of writing” (461). He worries that the writing-about-writing agenda “elevates the study of writing over the experience of writing,” an agenda perhaps appropriate for more advanced writing majors but complicit in what he sees as higher education’s current “hostility toward intellectual play and exploration” in the service of completely managed institutional priorities. He proposes that recognizing the power of expressivism can fuel compositionists’ hopes that students will embrace writing:

Without an urgency that is felt as personal, a writer will always be looking to the teacher, the boss, the arbiter for both permission to begin and approval to desist. (461)


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Moore & MacArthur. Automated Essay Evaluation. JoWR, June 2016. Posted 10/04/2016.

Moore, Noreen S., and Charles A. MacArthur. “Student Use of Automated Essay Evaluation Technology During Revision.” Journal of Writing Research 8.1 (2016): 149-75. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.

Noreen S. Moore and Charles A. MacArthur report on a study of 7th- and 8th-graders’ use of Automated Essay Evaluation technology (AEE) and its effects on their writing.

Moore and MacArthur define AEE as “the process of evaluating and scoring written prose via computer programs” (M. D. Shermis and J. Burstein, qtd. in Moore and MacArthur 150). The current study was part of a larger investigation of the use of AEE in K-12 classrooms (150, 153-54). Moore and MacArthur focus on students’ revision practices (154).

The authors argue that such studies are necessary because “AEE has the potential to offer more feedback and revision opportunities for students than may otherwise be available” (150). Teacher feedback, they posit, may not be “immediate” and may be “ineffective” and “inconsistent” as well as “time consuming,” while the alternative of peer feedback “requires proper training” (151). The authors also posit that AEE will increasingly become part of the writing education landscape and that teachers will benefit from “participat[ing]” in explorations of its effects (150). They argue that AEE should “complement” rather than replace teacher feedback and scoring (151).

Moore and MacArthur review extant research on two kinds of AEE, one that uses “Latent Semantic Analysis” (LSA) and one that has been “developed through model training” (152). Studies of an LSA program owned by Pearson and designed to evaluate summaries compared the program with “word-processing feedback” and showed enhanced improvement across many traits, including “quality, organization, content, use of detail, and style” as well as time spent on revision (152). Other studies also showed improvement. Moore and MacArthur note that some of these studies relied on scores from the program itself as indices of improvement and did not demonstrate any transfer of skills to contexts outside of the program (153).

Moore and MacArthur contend that their study differs from previous research in that it does not rely on “data collected by the system” but rather uses “real time” information from think-aloud protocols and semi-structured interviews to investigate students’ use of the technology. Moreover, their study reveals the kinds of revision students actually do (153). They ask:

  • How do students use AEE feedback to make revisions?
  • Are students motivated to make revisions while using AEE technology?
  • How well do students understand the feedback from AEE, both the substantive feedback and the conventions feedback? (154)

The researchers studied six students selected to be representative of a 12-student 7th- and 8th-grade “literacy class” at a private northeastern school whose students exhibited traits “that may interfere with school success” (154). The students were in their second year of AEE use and the teacher in the third year of use. Students “supplement[ed]” their literacy work with in-class work using the “web-based MY Access!” program (154).

Moore and MacArthur report that “intellimetric” scoring used by MY Access! correlates highly with scoring by human raters (155). The software is intended to analyze “focus/coherence, organization, elaboration/development, sentence structure, and mechanics/conventions” (155).

MY Access provides feedback through MY Tutor, which responds to “non-surface” issues, and MY Editor, which addresses spelling, punctuation, and other conventions. MY Tutor provides a “one sentence revision goal”; “strategies for achieving the goal”; and “a before and after example of a student revising based on the revision goal and strategy” (156). The authors further note that “[a]lthough the MY Tutor feedback is different for each score point and genre, the same feedback is given for the same score in the same genre” (156). MY Editor responds to specific errors in each text individually.

Each student submitted a first and revised draft of a narrative and an argumentative paper, for a total of 24 drafts (156). The researchers analyzed only revisions made during the think-aloud; any revision work prior to the initial submission did not count as data (157).

Moore and MacArthur found that students used MY Tutor for non-surface feedback only when their submitted essays earned low scores (158). Two of the three students who used the feature appeared to understand the feedback and used it successfully (163). The authors report that for the students who used it successfully, MY Tutor feedback inspired a larger range of changes and more effective changes in the papers than feedback from the teacher or from self-evaluation (159). These students’ changes addressed “audience engagement, focusing, adding argumentative elements, and transitioning” (159), whereas teacher feedback primarily addressed increasing detail.

One student who scored high made substantive changes rated as “minor successes” but did not use the MY Tutor tool. This student used MY Editor and appeared to misunderstand the feedback, concentrating on changes that eliminated the “error flag” (166).

Moore and MacArthur note that all students made non-surface revisions (160), and 71% of these efforts were suggested by AEE (161). However, 54.3% of the total changes did not succeed, and MY Editor suggested 68% of these (161). The authors report that the students lacked the “technical vocabulary” to make full use of the suggestions (165); moreover, they state that “[i]n many of the instances when students disagreed with MY Editor or were confused by the feedback, the feedback seemed to be incorrect” (166). The authors report other research that corroborates their concern that grammar checkers in general may often be incorrect (166).

As limitations, the researchers point to the small sample, which, however, allowed access to “rich data” and “detailed description” of actual use (167). They note also that other AEE program might yield different results. Lack of data on revisions students made before submitting their drafts also may have affected the results (167). The authors supply appendices detailing their research methods.

Moore and MacArthur propose that because the AEE scores prompt revision, such programs can effectively augment writing instruction, but recommend that scores need to track student development so that as students score near the maximum at a given level, new criteria and scores encourage more advanced work (167-68). Teachers should model the use of the program and provide vocabulary so students better understand the feedback. Moore and MacArthur argue that effective use of such programs can help students understand criteria for writing assessment and refine their own self-evaluation processes (168).

Research recommendations include asking whether scores from AEE continue to encourage revision and investigating how AEE programs differ in procedures and effectiveness. The study did not examine teachers’ approaches to the program. Moore and MacArthur urge that stakeholders, including “the people developing the technology and the teachers, coaches, and leaders using the technology . . . collaborate” so that AEE “aligns with classroom instruction” (168-69).


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Kelley, Brittany. Fan Fiction as a “Gift Economy.” C&C, June 2016. Posted 06/22/2016.

Kelley, Brittany. “Chocolate Frogs for My Betas!: Practicing Literacy at One Online Fanfiction Website.” Computers and Composition 40 (2916): 48-59. Web. 02 June 2016.

Brittany Kelley investigates the literacy practices of a fan-fiction site, the Ashwinder archive included in the Sycophant Hex fan community, a “site for quality Harry Potter fanfiction” (Sycophant Hex, qtd. in Kelley 49). Noting prior research on fan fiction that casts it as a locus for “resistance” within consumer cultures, Kelley contends that the interactions within the fan community she has studied are more complex, with unique “affective econom[ies]” (49) that both derive from and expand upon larger social forces (50).

Citing Kathleen Blake Yancey’s 2004 call for composition studies to embrace “this moment right now” for its unique window on what writing and identify mean in an age of increasing digital expansion, Kelley argues that fan fiction deserves attention because it would seem to embody the democratization offered by new online environments (49). For Kelley, however, an important reason to study fan fiction is what it can reveal about evolving digital practices, how they shape writers, and how these practices “change the ways in which texts are produced, circulated, and received” (49).

Kelley documents the degree to which sites like Sycophant Hex are governed by hierarchical gatekeeping processes, such as “vehement” assertions from administrators about the importance of correct English grammar, at the same time that they play a “teaching role” for novice writers who are encouraged to use the site’s resources to improve their writing (50). Contributors are also held to high standards with regard to accurate use of the Harry Potter “canon” and are reminded that while they “own” new characters, invented settings, and events they create beyond those that appear in the books, the “intellectual property” belongs to J. K. Rowling (51-52). Thus, Kelley posits, the site offers access and agency tempered with elements of control.

Kelley’s particular focus is the nature of the exchanges that govern interaction on the site. Though these exchanges take place within a rule-bound context that requires strict adherence to the canon and that channels writers into categories of permitted activities, Kelley argues that the more salient feature of such sites is the degree to which they are governed by the development of emotional relationships and a “‘goodwill’ ethics of exchange” (52).

Citing Henry Jenkins, Kelley posits that continued interaction within the group is the incentive for participation in the exchange of symbolic and social rather than financial capital (52-53). She sees this incentive as affective and emotional, noting for example that plagiarism, which is loosely defined on the site, is seen not so much in terms of legal ownership but rather as “a direct offense against the affective economy of the website” (52).

Kelley illustrates this “goodwill” ethic through a case study of one successful fan-fiction writer, Chivalric. In Kelley’s view, this writer’s practice demonstrates how writers establish long-lasting and emotionally rich relationships with the “betas” who voluntarily edit both for surface correctness and for plot and character development (56). Members of the fan-fiction community serve as betas for each other, generating what Kelley describes as a “gift economy” in contrast to a “commodity culture” (53).

Kelley presents Chivalric’s process to support her claim that literacy practices among fan writers are “deeply heteroglossic” (53). Writing produced by these writers integrates many elements and voices: the intellectual creations of J. K. Rowling; an extensive set of categories and tropes created by community members over time; discussion and debate on forums; specific group-governed genre expectations; and the ongoing interactions among authors and beta readers (55). Many of these intertwined voices are documented in the notes, acknowledgments, and dedications that accompany texts (56).

Further analyzing the heteroglossic nature of these sites, Kelley draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s distinction between “centripetal” and “centrifugal” language practices to examine Chivalric’s short story, “Divorce.” Centripetal or “unitary language,” in this view, is language that is bound by clear directives from the language community, in this case the accepted uses that can be made of the Harry Potter characters and themes. At the same time, Kelley writes that Chivalric’s story, which won one of the competitive challenges generated on the site, demonstrates centrifugal force in that it gives the standard tropes and story material a “unique twist” (55) that results in an original, “transformative” telling that expands readers’ understanding of the conventional materials Chivalric incorporated (54, 55-56). This story, Kelley argues, comments on the power relationships among two Harry Potter characters, legal and political machinations in the post-canon world of fan fiction, and implications of gender in the particular category into which the story falls.

Citing Matt Hills, Kelley notes that prior research casting fan fiction as an avenue for resistance to dominant cultures has been criticized as an attempt by scholars to justify their attention to the form and to cast fan writers as “mini-academics” taking on the role of cultural critics (50, 57). She argues that her study reveals the degree to which academic views of digital environments as “somehow democratizing and hence liberating” should also recognize that “these spaces are still beset with the tensions of power structures” (57).

In her view, the hope that the access offered by such sites will allow for “widely shared and discussed knowledge” free of the bonds of entrenched power systems should include the caveat that much of what ultimately gets distributed “already fits nearly within dominant narratives” (57). The practices Kelley has examined, she contends, are still subject to issues of “race, gender, sex, class, sexuality, etc.” (58).

Noting scholarship on the possibilities of importing fan-fiction processes into the classroom, Kelly cites Michelle Knobel and Colin Lankshear to caution that it may not always be possible or advisable to do so. However, she notes that fan-fiction communities adopt many features of formal writing instruction, such as peer review and revision, and that components of fan-fiction engagement mirror the goals of writing classrooms. In particular, these sites feature learning that is “entirely self-directed” and that is enabled by the kind of intense emotional engagement that fosters learning (58). For these reasons, Kelley urges more “in-depth investigation of the writing practices of these online communities” (58).


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San Pedro, Timothy J. Native American Silence as Shield. RTE, Nov. 2015. Posted 01/18/2016.

San Pedro, Timothy J. “Silence as Shields: Agency and Resistances among Native American Students in the Urban Southwest.” Research in the Teaching of English 50.2 (2015): 132-53. Print.

Timothy J. San Pedro recounts insights from an ethnographic study conducted over the course of three years as a participant/observer in a class on Native American literature taught at a high school in the southwest United States (132). He draws on “field notes, artifacts [such as written and art assignments], and audio-recordings” as well as “semistructured interviews” (150n3), featuring three female students who identified as Native American (133). San Pedro shares these students’ experiences in their classrooms, especially in their history classes, as they negotiate their identities in the context of the “settler colonial discourse” they encounter in their school environments (135).

San Pedro focuses on a stereotype of Native Americans and Native American students as “‘naturally,’ ‘biologically,’ or ‘culturally’ reflective, silent, timid and/or nonresponsive” (134). He states that as he began his study, he was influenced by scholarship that posits that these features of Native American students’ classroom behavior resulted from “mismatches” between the kinds of discourse they experienced in their home communities and the discourse expectations in United States high schools (139). However, in his article, he explores how he came to see these three students’ silence as a form of resistance to the dominant narratives expounded in their classrooms and to the systemic “macroagressions” they experienced, as well as “microagressions”—exclusionary or silencing acts teachers and fellow students might not even be aware of (134, 136).

To frame the ways in which the students’ choices constituted resistance and to explore the effects of that resistance, San Pedro uses the term “critical silent literacies” (142; emphasis original). In this critical practice, the students respond to micro- and macroaggressions by withdrawing from classroom discussions. “Storying” and storytelling through relationships of communicative trust with others then allows the silenced students to make sense of their responses to these aggressions, responses that are therefore “voiced” to allow the ways they both protest and protect to emerge (143, 149).

San Pedro explores different kinds of resistance to analyze how the students’ use of silence and then of storying embodies agency. Resistance can be “damaging and self-defeating”; San Pedro notes how zero-tolerance policies can limit students’ options for productive resistance (142). Other forms of resistance can be what D. Solorzano and D. Delgado Bernal call “conformist”; this resistance allows students to “accept or reject” elements of the conflicting cultures they must negotiate (142). Other resistance can be considered “resilient” (T. Yosso, qtd. in San Pedro 142), leading to a “survival-through-resistance strategy” that G. Vizenor labels “survivance” (qtd. In San Pedro 142; emphasis original).

To illustrate that students choose silence in order to resist rather than passively bringing silence into the classroom because it typifies their home cultures, San Pedro presents several anecdotes in which the students experienced exclusion and even mockery from the dominant culture within the classroom. Each student offered active participation but felt unable to breach the systemic exclusion. “Nisha’s” teacher stopped calling on her when she questioned norms as presented in the history books (140-41); “Shila” was laughed at for not knowing Native American history that had not been taught 145-46); “Eileen” discovered that her history teacher did not know who Chief Sitting Bull was (146-47).

For San Pedro, the slowly developing trust he was able to share with the students allowed them to interpret their reactions to these experiences and to turn them into resilient forms of resistance (149). Such resilient strategies, San Pedro argues, can lead to productive change. He considers the silence of the students he studied resilient because it expanded, through shared storytelling, into an awareness of the kind of resistance they were practicing and became “agentive” (149). Such acts of agency, when voiced and shared through critical silent literacies, San Pedro contends, effect change by encouraging educators to examine more carefully how their teaching choices can subtly or explicitly exclude and silence. He invites readers to consider themselves part of the community of sharing that recognizes the agency in these students’ choices and is moved to a productive response (149).

 


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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).