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Gallagher, Chris W. Behaviorism as Social-Process Pedagogy. Dec. CCC. Posted 01/12/2017.

Gallagher, Chris W. “What Writers Do: Behaviors, Behaviorism, and Writing Studies.” College Composition and Communication 68.2 (2016): 238-65. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

Chris W. Gallagher provides a history of composition’s relationship with behaviorism, arguing that this relationship is more complex than commonly supposed and that writing scholars can use the connections to respond to current pressures imposed by reformist models.

Gallagher notes the efforts of many writing program administrators (WPAs) to articulate professionally informed writing outcomes to audiences in other university venues, such as general-education committees (238-39). He reports that such discussions often move quickly from compositionists’ focus on what helps students “writ[e] well” to an abstract and universal ideal of “good writing” (239).

This shift, in Gallagher’s view, encourages writing professionals to get caught up in “the work texts do” in contrast to the more important focus on “the work writers do” (239; emphasis original). He maintains that “the work writers do” is in fact an issue of behaviors writers exhibit and practice, and that the resistance to “behaviorism” that characterizes the field encourages scholars to lose sight of the fact that the field is “in the behavior business; we are, and should be, centrally concerned with what writers do” (240; emphasis original).

He suggests that “John Watson’s behavioral ‘manifesto’—his 1913 paper, ‘Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It’” (241) captures what Gallagher sees as the “general consensus” of the time and a defining motivation for behaviorism: a shift away from “fuzzy-headed . . . introspective analysis” to the more productive process of “study[ing] observable behaviors” (241). Gallagher characterizes many different types of behaviorism, ranging from those designed to actually control behavior to those hoping to understand “inner states” through their observable manifestations (242).

One such productive model of behaviorism, in Gallagher’s view, is that of B. F. Skinner in the 1960s and 1970s. Gallagher argues that Skinner emphasized not “reflex behaviors” like those associated with Pavlov but rather “operant behaviors,” which Gallagher, citing psychologist John Staddon, characterizes as concerned with “the ways in which human (and other animal) behavior operates in its environment and is guided by its consequences” (242).

Gallagher contends that composition’s resistance to work like Skinner’s was influenced by views like that of James A. Berlin, for whom behaviorism was aligned with “current-traditional rhetoric” because it was deemed an “objective rhetoric” that assumed that writing was merely the process of conveying an external reality (243). The “epistemic” focus and “social turn” that emerged in the 1980s, Gallagher writes, generated resistance to “individualism and empiricism” in general, leading to numerous critiques of what were seen as behaviorist impulses.

Gallagher attributes much tension over behaviorism in composition to the influx of government funding in the 1960s designed to “promote social efficiency through strategic planning and accountability” (248). At the same time that this funding rewarded technocratic expertise, composition focused on “burgeoning liberation movements”; in Gallagher’s view, behaviorism erred by falling on the “wrong” or “science side” of this divide (244). Gallagher chronicles efforts by the National Council of Teachers of English and various scholars to arrive at a “détente” that could embrace forms of accountability fueled by behaviorism, such as “behavioral objectives” (248), while allowing the field to “hold on to its humanist core” (249).

In Gallagher’s view, scholars who struggled to address behaviorism such as Lynn Z. and Martin Bloom moved beyond mechanistic models of learning to advocate many features of effective teaching recognized today, such as a resistance to error-oriented pedagogy, attention to process, purposes, and audiences, and provision of “regular, timely feedback” (245-46). Negative depictions of behaviorism, Gallagher argues, in fact neglect the degree to which, in such scholarship, behaviorism becomes “a social-process pedagogy” (244; emphasis original).

In particular, Gallagher argues that “the most controversial behaviorist figure in composition history,” Robert Zoellner (246), has been underappreciated. According to Gallagher, Zoellner’s “talk-write” pedagogy was a corrective for “think-write” models that assumed that writing merely conveyed thought, ignoring the possibility that writing and thinking could inform each other (246). Zoellner rejected reflex-driven behaviorism that predetermined stimulus-response patterns, opting instead for an operant model in which objectives followed from rather than controlled students’ behaviors, which should be “feely emitted” (Zoellner, qtd. in Gallagher 250) and should emerge from “transactional” relationships among teachers and students in a “collaborative,” lab-like setting in which teachers interacted with students and modeled writing processes (247).

The goal, according to Gallagher, was consistently to “help students develop robust repertoires of writing behaviors to help them adapt to the different writing situations in which they would find themselves” (247). Gallagher contends that Zoellner advocated teaching environments in which

[behavioral objectives] are not codified before the pedagogical interaction; . . . are rooted in the transactional relationship between teachers and students; . . . are not required to be quantifiably measurable; and . . . operate in a humanist idiom. (251).

Rejected in what Martin Nystrand denoted “the social 1980s” (qtd. in Gallagher 251), as funding for accountability initiatives withered (249), behaviorism did attract the attention of Mike Rose. His chapter in Why Writers Can’t Write and that of psychology professor Robert Boice attended to the ways in which writers relied on specific behaviors to overcome writer’s block; in Gallagher’s view, Rose’s understanding of the short-comings of overzealous behaviorism did not prevent him from taking “writers’ behaviors qua behaviors extremely seriously” (253).

The 1990s, Gallagher reports, witnessed a moderate revival of interest in Zoellner, who became one of the “unheard voices” featured in new histories of the field (254). Writers of these histories, however, struggled to dodge behaviorism itself, hoping to develop an empiricism that would not insist on “universal laws and objective truth claims” (255). After these efforts, however, Gallagher reports that the term faded from view, re-emerging only recently in Maja Joiwind Wilson’s 2013 dissertation as a “repressive” methodology exercised as a form of power (255).

In contrast to these views, Gallagher argues that “behavior should become a key term in our field” (257). Current pressures to articulate ways of understanding learning that will resonate with reformers and those who want to impose rigid measurements, he contends, require a vocabulary that foregrounds what writers actually do and frames the role of teachers as “help[ing] students expand their behavioral repertoires” (258; emphasis original). This vocabulary should emphasize the social aspects of all behaviors, thereby foregrounding the fluid, dynamic nature of learning.

In his view, such a vocabulary would move scholars beyond insisting that writing and learning “operate on a higher plane than that of mere behaviors”; instead, it would generate “better ways of thinking and talking about writing and learning behaviors” (257; emphasis original). He recommends, for example, creating “learning goals” instead of “outcomes” because such a shift discourages efforts to reduce complex activities to pre-determined, reflex-driven steps toward a static result (256). Scholars accustomed to a vocabulary of “processes, practices, and activities” can benefit from learning as well to discuss “specific, embodied, scribal behaviors” and the environments necessary if the benefits accruing to these behaviors are to be realized (258).

 


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Staley and Leonardi. Teacher Education for Gender and Sexual Diversity. RTE, Nov. 2016. Posted 01/04/2017.

Staley, Sara, and Bethy Leonardi. “Leaning In to Discomfort: Preparing Literacy Teachers for Gender and Sexual Diversity.” Research in the Teaching of English 51.2 (2016): 209-29. Print.

Sara Staley and Bethy Leonardi present the results of a literacy methods course for preservice English language arts teacher in which practices for supporting LGBTQ students were foregrounded. The authors argue that the “disturbing number of lives lost in recent years among youth who identified or were perceived to identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning” demands attention from educators who have failed to address “the resounding silence around gender and sexual diversity (GSD) . . . that has long pervaded teacher education” (209). The authors contend that LGBTQ students often report feeling that “school was often an unsafe place” (209). Staley and Leonardi discuss the results of a curriculum designed to help novice teachers make their classrooms more welcoming to such students.

The course was piloted in Fall 2012 and the study conducted during the Spring 2013 semester at a large public university in the Mountain West (214). Students in the course were about to commence student teaching (215). Primary data consisted of transcripts of
“two whole-class fishbowl conversations” conducted during weeks 4 and 16, and a blog that students began working with in week 4 (216). The researchers provided specific prompts for the blog. Of the seventeen students in the course, sixteen agreed to participate; three were eliminated as data sources because they contributed only minimally in the assigned venues, so eleven who self-identified as female and two who self-identified as male participated (215).

The researchers, both doctoral students, co-designed the course and the study (215). Staley was the “lead instructor” and Leonardi a “participant observer in three class sessions” as well as a facilitator of various components of the course (215).

The analytic framework for the course and study involved a “queer theoretical perspective on the problem of heteronormativity in schools” that urges teachers to disrupt dominant assumptions that sexuality functions as a binary in which heterosexuality is normal and other forms of sexual identification are deviant (211). The authors contend that such an approach is preferable to standard anti-bullying programs that “locate the problem in individuals, rather than in institutional practices that encourage bullying and oppress on the basis of sex, gender, and sexuality” (212). Staley and Leonardi combine this approach with that of Kevin K. Kumashiro, who casts anti-oppression education in terms of “desire, resistance, and crisis” (213, italics original) and of Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön, who encourages “leaning in” as a way of overcoming the resistance that can derail the process of “unlearning” long-held views about topics like sexuality (222; italics original). The authors define “leaning in” as “a moving toward discomfort, rather than away from it, and inquiry into what can be learned from such energetic responses as emotional pain, fear, and discomfort” (223).

These analytical perspectives led Staley and Leonardi to focus on manifestations of emotion in their data, as well as reactions to the course’s emphasis on the role of teachers in disrupting heteronormativity (217). They identified emotional responses as “discomfort,” “desire to disrupt,” and “desire to resist.” A recurrent theme in students’ responses involved “how” to further GSD-inclusive curricula; this marker was labeled “wrestling with praxis.” As a result of this coding, students were categorized as “dedicated disrupters,” “discomforted,” and “resistors” (217; italics original). The discussion centers on the “discomforted” because this group of eight students exhibited significant changes during the course (218).

The emotional shifts experienced by the discomforted students began with “shock,” “incredulity,” and “disbelief” as they confronted claims in the course readings that school environments were not uniformly progressive and that teachers were often not protected when they attempted to incorporate anti-oppressive curricula on GSD issues (218-19). The students became aware of their own lack of knowledge about responses to LGBTQ concerns in schools and the failure of their own educations as preservice teachers to address these concerns (219). The beginning teachers’ own experiences in grappling with classroom incidents in which they did not know how to disrupt heteronormative oppression led to a shift to “wrestling with praxis” as they began to search for viable tools to protect students (220).

Staley and Leonardi report that these searches and discussions led to positive results as discomforted students in their class began to be able to articulate “specific examples of actionable steps that literacy teachers could take to disrupt heteronormativity,” including recognizing the need to move beyond simply including LGBTQ-themed literature in the classroom (221). The authors note, however, that this increasing practical grounding did not alleviate the students’ sense that there were no simple solutions or “path[s]” they could consistently follow but rather that learning to address oppressive behavior in the classroom was a matter of “ongoing labor” (Kumashiro, qtd. in Staley and Leonardi 222).

The authors provide two examples of students who responded to the emotional crisis generated by unlearning familiar assumptions by “leaning In” to their discomfort. These two students “each began to frame their discomfort as generative and necessary—not as something to be resolved, once and for all” (222). These two responses emphasized the importance of considering mistakes as ways to move forward and of recognizing fear in challenging situations as a necessary component of acting in circumstances where there will never be clear answers (223-24).

Noting that language-arts teachers are especially well-positioned to bring GSD concerns into curricula, the authors call for a deliberate focus on these concerns in teacher education (224), so that teachers have tools that allow them to “move beyond inclusion” to active resistance to heteronormative agendas (224). They note that their own curriculum might have productively incorporated awareness of the necessary emotional journey in their course framework, recognizing and “celebrat[ing]” early “glimmers of leaning in” (225; emphasis original). Student teachers, they argue, will benefit from learning a greater “tolerance for discomfort, uncertainty, and ambiguity” (225). Further, they encourage efforts to engage prospective teachers whose cultural values, for example religious views, make grappling with GSD issues even more problematic than for others (225). The authors endorse the concept of leaning in to discomfort as a way to draw preservice teachers into the “ongoing labor” of anti-oppressive education.

 


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Fels et al. Issues with Contingent Writing Center Workers. Forum, Fall 2016. Posted 12/9/2016.

Fels, Dawn, Clint Gardner, Maggie M. Herb, and Liliana M. Naydan. “Toward an Investigation into the Working Conditions of Non-Tenure Line, Contingent Writing Center Workers.” Forum: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty 20.1 (2016): A10-A16. Print.

Dawn Fels, Clint Gardner, Maggie M. Herb, and Liliana M. Naydan published in Forum: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty, a section included twice yearly in College Composition and Communication. The authors provide preliminary findings from a study in progress on working conditions in writing centers. Specifically, they ask: “What are the personal, professional, and programmatic risks and benefits of contingent writing center positions?” (A12).

Their interest derives in part from recent data showing that the number of writing center personnel with tenured or tenure-line positions has declined during the recent decade. A 2001-2002 survey by the Writing Centers Research Project indicated that about 42% of writing center directors were tenured or on tenure-line tracks. In contrast, a 2014 study by Emily Isaacs and Melinda Knight found that only 29% of directors now held such positions. Moreover, Isaacs and Knight found that peer tutors staffed 81% of the centers studied (A10). Fels et al. cite as well 2011 data from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) that finds that the use of contingent labor has increased across all academic fields (A10).

Fels et al. write that they hope to address the underrepresentation of writing center labor issues in composition scholarship. Data from the National Census of Writing Database, they state, address “the status of writing center director positions” but do not draw the information from these faculty themselves, nor does its report on peer tutors enlist responses from the tutors (A10). In contrast, Fels et al. are surveying and interviewing “all levels of contingent writing center workers” (A11).

With a grant from the International Writing Centers Association (IWCA), an Assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English, Fels et al. began their study in Fall 2015 by recruiting participants who were at least 18 years old who had worked in a contingent writing center capacity within the last five years (A12). They publicized their call on social media, on relevant web sites and listservs, and via word of mouth (A12-A13). More than 100 participants who took the preliminary survey agreed to interviews (A13). The researchers will also examine various documents such as “contracts, job descriptions, and policy statements” (A13).

To ground their project, Fels et al. sought out current position statements that specifically address labor issues in writing centers. At the IWCA web site, they found only a thirty-year-old article from the Writing Center Journal by Jeanne Simpson; this article, which was listed as a “Resource,” culminated in a statement advocating “clear job descriptions” and supplying guidelines for directors, while advising against the use of contingent faculty and staff (A11). The researchers note that the 2015 Indianapolis Resolution on issues with contingent labor in writing programs “does make mention of contingency in the writing center field, but only in the first paragraph” (A11).

Fels et al. hope to revise Simpson’s statement and encourage the use of their data throughout the field of composition (A12). They report “preliminary observations” (A13), including a range of participant comments, including one from an interviewee who finds that his part-time job “benefits his family” and supplies him with “considerable autonomy and healthy, collaborative, supportive relationships” on the job despite his recognition that he is “grossly underpaid” (A13). In contrast, other interviewees speak about diminished or non-existent academic freedom and lack of respect from colleagues (A13).

The researchers focus on a participant who was concerned not about her own job situation but rather about the effects of widespread use of contingent faculty on students, for example because of its effect on the “consistency” of the services involved (A13-A14). Issues of student welfare, the authors state, are related to what Seth Kahn calls “the emotional wages argument,” which claims that the intrinsic satisfaction of serving students should be adequate compensation for low wages in the teaching profession (qtd. in Fels et al. A14).

Fels et al. argue that this argument is a version of the tendency to blame poorly paid educators for their own plight because they are willing to work for less than adequate compensation (A14). However, Fels et al. contend that educators’ ability to serve students diminishes if their own needs are not met. They write that “educators . . . need to learn how to articulate their own value” and to understand and express the degree to which “they are integral to institutions of higher education” (A14).

The authors note that many of their interviewees expressed a sense that their own situation must be “unique” because, as one participant indicated, “it was hard to imagine other writing center administrators facing a similar set of challenges” (A15). One result of their study, they hope, will be to alleviate the feeling of isolation that many in the writing-center field report (A15).

Fels et al. estimate that it may take two years to complete the interviews and analysis they envision (A15). They hope to increase awareness of such issues as the replacement of experienced personnel with “less experienced and qualified candidates,” the lack of long-term contracts, the exploitation of staff who “work well beyond their contractual duties,” and the overreliance on student workers (A16). This study, they state, “will fill a void in the current scholarship” (A16).

 

 

 


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Davila and Dickinson. Place as Racist Ideology. Comp. Studies Fall 2016. Posted 12/4/2016.

Davila, Bethany, and Hannah Dickinson. “At a Distance: The Encoding of Place in the University.” Composition Studies 44.2 (2016): 94-115. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.

Bethany Davila and Hannah Dickinson present a case study of the rhetorical effects of references to place in higher education, in particular capital-P Place, which they argue takes on the role of a totalizing marker that sustains racial inequalities.

Their study grows out of other research in which they interviewed students and instructors at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor about various aspects of college writing. Two interviews, one with an African American student and one with a white, male adjunct instructor, stood out for the researchers because of their visible use of place and Place to construct student identities (96). Davila and Dickinson analyze these two interviews to understand how the invocation of place can insert oppressive ideologies into discourse, often despite the intentions of the speaker (101).

They cite the relationship between the “prestigious” University of Michigan and the neighboring city of Detroit as an example of the way place functions as Place to influence the understanding of race at the university. Detroit, which is 83% African American, with a poverty rate of 39%, contrasts with UM, where only 4.65% of the students are African American; the poverty rate in Ann Arbor is 22% (95). Davila and Dickinson note that a ban on affirmative action has exacerbated this disparity (95).

Both low-come students and African Americans, they write, “perhaps especially those from Detroit, may see UM as unwelcoming” (95). A campus movement, Being Black at the University of Michigan (#BBUM), works “to increase awareness about racial inequality” on campus; the movement elicits many statements attesting to discomfort among UM African American students (96). The authors find references to Detroit particularly indicative of how place becomes Place and guides narratives of identity.

They cite the collection City Comp: Identities, Spaces, and Practices as an example of scholarship that explores how cities affect relationships, noting that whether the view of the city comes from inside or outside its boundaries affects the type of narrative that results (97). Their analysis draws on Michel de Certeau’s tropes of the “voyeur” and the “walker” as illustrating two types of interaction with urban contexts (97). The voyeur is “situated at a distance” (98); in de Certeau’s words, the view of the voyeur “makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text” (qtd. in Davila and Dickinson 98). In contrast, the walker is immersed in “the everyday practices of the city” (98), a relationship evoked by a number of scholars in rhetoric and composition who have studied Detroit (98).

Davila and Dickinson argue that talk about Detroit in many public venues, rather than being an accurate representation of the city, in fact works “as coded language, disguising racist ideologies” (99). They find such discourse to be a form of “white talk,” which they define as language that allows Whites to present themselves as talking about something other than race when they are actually making racist claims. Such talk, the authors contend, allows Whites to avoid the consequences of overt racist speech and to ignore the history of racist oppression that acknowledgment of race as an issue would expose (99).

While Place participates in these erasures among Whites, they argue that it functions in the interview with the African American student as well to establish identity and “reinforce racial inequality” (100).

In Davila and Dickinson’s report of their interview with the white male instructor, they note that he makes “a potentially productive teacherly move” (102) in noting that not all African-American students are alike, but his comments characterize students from Detroit based largely on the fact that they are from Detroit. Asked to “describe the students you pictured in your mind while reading these papers” from Davila’s study, “Simon” attributes the work to “Detroit African American” (102). In his elaboration, he characterizes these students as having “puppy dog energy” but being “really far behind. . . . at the bottom of the pack” (qtd. in Davila and Dickinson 103). The authors see such depictions as “racist ideologies disguised as commonsense understandings of Detroit” (104). In their view, Detroit becomes a code word for a particular set of assumptions about African Americans.

The authors’ analysis finds Simon attributing the deficiencies he detects in the students’ work to a poor educational system supposedly characteristic of Detroit and to the “culture” of the city, which Davila and Dickinson see as Simon’s attempts to elide the racist implications of his remarks with more acceptable “structural” explanations (103). Such elisions, they argue, provide the city with agency and deny such agency to the residents, who are damaged by what Simon calls “the unique tragedy happening in Detroit” (qtd. In Davila and Dickinson 105). This characterization of the city not only allows Simon to deny that his views have to do with race but also removes agency from residents of Detroit, who are at the mercy of the city (105).

Interviewing “Sean,” the African American UM undergraduate, Davila and Dickinson see him as the “walker” as opposed to Simon, the “voyeur” (107). In Sean’s discourse, the authors find indications that Sean also imparts agency to the city, but considers himself “unique” because he can cite Detroit experiences that set him apart from other African American students (107-08). According to Davila and Dickinson, Sean refuses to surrender his own agency to the city; he describes actions he took to “get out of Detroit” (qtd. in Davila and Dickinson 108).

The authors read Sean’s responses as evidence that, in Sean’s mind, relationships with Detroit “can be negotiated” (109; emphasis original); in their view, Sean feels that “to use one’s common sense and to keep one’s cool” are ways to manage the city’s power (109). They note that Sean associates passivity with Ann Arbor, where, they write, students may “adopt the kind of complacency that is possible in a location of privilege” (109). In contrast, Sean describes himself as “open or calm” and imbued with an agentive “aggressiveness” that allows him to function in his unique place (qtd. in Davila and Dickinson 109). Unlike Simon, Sean positions Detroit as the “inside” space, and UM and the suburbs as outside, overturning the commonsense definition of Detroiters as “marginal” (110).

Davila and Dickinson argue that like Simon, Sean uses Place as a means of talking about particular kinds of African Americans, potentially shutting down more nuanced discussions of race and oppression (110-11). They further posit that despite Sean’s alternative representations of Detroit, Simon’s are “more powerful . . . in shaping Detroit-as-Place” because of Simon’s location within the “university power structure” (111) and its kinship with “common outsider understandings of Detroit” (111).

The authors urge more awareness of the ways in which knowledge about where students are from drives assumptions about identity in classrooms. They advocate deliberate effort to generate “alternative perspectives” by listening to students rather than to commonsense assertions about place and to be alert to the ideological underpinnings engendered when place becomes Place (112).


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Patchan and Shunn. Effects of Author and Reviewer Ability in Peer Feedback. JoWR 2016. Posted 11/25/2016.

Patchan, Melissa M., and Christian D. Shunn. “Understanding the Effects of Receiving Peer Feedback for Text Revision: Relations between Author and Reviewer Ability.” Journal of Writing Research 8.2 (2016): 227-65. Web. 18 Nov. 2016. doi: 10.17239/jowr-2016.08.02.03

Melissa M. Patchan and Christian D. Shunn describe a study of the relationship between the abilities of writers and peer reviewers in peer assessment. The study asks how the relative ability of writers and reviewers influences the effectiveness of peer review as a learning process.

The authors note that in many content courses, the time required to provide meaningful feedback encourages many instructors to turn to peer assessment (228). They cite studies suggesting that in such cases, peer response can be more effective than teacher response because, for example, students may actually receive more feedback, the feedback may be couched in more accessible terms, and students may benefit from seeing models and new strategies (228-29). Still, studies find, teachers and students both question the efficacy of peer assessment, with students stating that the quality of review depends largely on the abilities of the reviewer (229).

Patchan and Shunn distinguish between the kind of peer review characteristic of writing classrooms, which they describe as “pair or group-based face-to-face conversations” emphasizing “qualitative feedback” and the type more often practiced in large content classes, which they see as more like “professional journal reviewing” that is “asynchronous, and written-based” (228). Their study addresses the latter format and is part of a larger study examining peer feedback in a widely required psychology class at a “large, public research university in the southeast” (234).

A random selection of 189 students wrote initial drafts in response to an assignment assessing media handling of a psychological study using criteria from the course textbook (236, 238). Students then received four drafts to review and were given a week to revise their own drafts in response to feedback. Participants used the “web-based peer assessment functions of turnitin.com” (237).

The researchers rated participants as high-ability writers using SAT scores and grades in their two first-year writing courses (236). Graduate rhetoric students also rated the first drafts. The protocol then included a “median split” to designate writers in binary fashion as either high- or low-ability. “High” authors were categorized as “high” reviewers. Patchan and Shunn note that there was a wide range in writer abilities but argue that, even though the “design decreases the power of this study,” such determinations were needed because of the large sample size, which in turn made the detection of “important patterns” likely (236-37). They feel that “a lower powered study was a reasonable tradeoff for higher external validity (i.e., how reviewer ability would typically be detected)” (237).

The authors describe their coding process in detail. In addition to coding initial drafts for quality, coders examined each reviewer’s feedback for its attention to higher-order problems and lower-order corrections (239-40). Coders also tabulated which comments resulted in revision as well as the “quality of the revision” (241). This coding was intended to “determine how the amount and type of comments varied as a function of author ability and reviewer ability” (239). A goal of the study was to determine what kinds of feedback triggered the most effective responses in “low” authors (240).

The study was based on a cognitive model of writing derived from the updated work of Linda Flower and John R. Hayes, in which three aspects of writing/revision follow a writer’s review of a text: problem detection, problem diagnosis, and strategy selection for solving the diagnosed problems (230-31). In general, “high” authors were expected to produce drafts with fewer initial problems and to have stronger reading skills that allowed them to detect and diagnose more problems in others’ drafts, especially “high-level” problems having to do with global issues as opposed to issues of surface correctness (230). High ability authors/reviewers were also assumed to have a wider repertoire of solution strategies to suggest for peers and to apply to their own revisions (233). All participants received a rubric intended to guide their feedback toward higher-order issues (239).

Some of the researchers’ expectations were confirmed, but others were only partially supported or not supported (251). Writers whose test scores and grades categorized them as “high” authors did produce better initial drafts, but only by a slight margin. The researchers posit that factors other than ability may affect draft quality, such as interest or time constraints (243). “High” and “low” authors received the same number of comments despite differences in the quality of the drafts (245), but “high” authors made more higher-order comments even though they didn’t provide more solutions (246). “High” reviewers indicated more higher-order issues to “low” authors than to “high,” while “low” reviewers suggested the same number of higher-order changes to both “high” and “low” authors (246).

Patchan and Shunn considered the “implementation rate,” or number of comments on which students chose to act, and “revision quality” (246). They analyzed only comments that were specific enough to indicate action. In contrast to findings in previous studies, the expectation that better writers would make more and better revisions was not supported. Overall, writers acted on only 32% of the comments received and only a quarter of the comments resulted in improved drafts (248). Author ability did not factor into these results. Moreover, the ability of the reviewer had no effect on how many revisions were made or how effective they were (248).

It was expected that low-ability authors would implement more suggestions from higher-ability reviewers, but in fact, “low authors implemented more high-level criticism comments . . . from low reviewers than from high reviewers” (249). The quality of the revisions also improved for low-ability writers when the comments came from low-ability reviewers. The researchers conclude that “low authors benefit the most from feedback provided by low reviewers” (249).

Students acted on 41% of the low-level criticisms, but these changes seldom resulted in better papers (249).

The authors posit that rates of commenting and implementation may both be impacted by limits or “thresholds” on how much feedback a given reviewer is willing to provide and how many comments a writer is able or willing to act on (252, 253). They suggest that low-ability reviewers may explain problems in language that is more accessible to writers with less ability. Patchan and Shunn suggest that feedback may be most effective when it occurs within the student’s zone of proximal development, so that weaker writers may be helped most by peers just beyond them in ability rather than by peers with much more sophisticated skills (253).

In the authors’ view, that “neither author ability nor reviewer ability per se directly affected the amount and quality of revisions” (253) suggests that the focus in designing effective peer review processes should shift from how to group students to improving students’ ability to respond to comments (254). They recommend further research using more “direct” measures of writing and reviewing ability (254). A major conclusion from this study is that “[h]igher-ability students will likely revise their texts successfully regardless of who [they are] partnered with, but the lower-ability students may need feedback at their own level” (255).


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West-Puckett, Stephanie. Digital Badging as Participatory Assessment. CE, Nov. 2016. Posted 11/17/2016.

Stephanie West-Puckett presents a case study of the use of “digital badges” to create a local, contextualized, and participatory assessment process that works toward social justice in the writing classroom.

She notes that digital badges are graphic versions of those earned by scouts or worn by members of military groups to signal “achievement, experience, or affiliation in particular communities” (130). Her project, begun in Fall 2014, grew out of Mozilla’s free Open Badging Initiative and the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC) that funded grants to four universities as well as to museums, libraries, and community partnerships to develop badging as a way of recognizing learning (131).

West-Puckett employed badges as a way of encouraging and assessing student engagement in the outcomes and habits of mind included in such documents as the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, the Outcomes Statements for First-Year Composition produced by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, and her own institution’s outcomes statement (137). Her primary goal is to foster a “participatory” process that foregrounds the agency of teachers and students and recognizes the ways in which assessment can influence classroom practice. She argues that such participation in designing and interpreting assessments can address the degree to which assessment can drive bias and limit access and agency for specific groups of learners (129).

She reviews composition scholarship characterizing most assessments as “top-down” (127-28). In these practices, West-Puckett argues, instruments such as rubrics become “fetishized,” with the result that they are forced upon contexts to which they are not relevant, thus constraining the kinds of assignments and outcomes teachers can promote (134). Moreover, assessments often fail to encourage students to explore a range of literacies and do not acknowledge learners’ achievements within those literacies (130). More valid, for West-Puckett, are “hyperlocal” assessments designed to help teachers understand how students are responding to specific learning opportunities (134). Allowing students to join in designing and implementing assessments makes the learning goals visible and shared while limiting the power of assessment tools to marginalize particular literacies and populations (128).

West-Puckett contends that the multimodal focus in writing instruction exacerbates the need for new modes of assessment. She argues that digital badges partake of “the primacy of visual modes of communication,” especially for populations “whose bodies were not invited into the inner sanctum of a numerical and linguistic academy” (132). Her use of badges contributes to a form of assessment that is designed not to deride writing that does not meet the “ideal text” of an authority but rather to enlist students’ interests and values in “a dialogic engagement about what matters in writing” (133).

West-Puckett argues for pairing digital badging with “critical validity inquiry,” in which the impact of an assessment process is examined through a range of theoretical frames, such as feminism, Marxism, or queer or disability theory (134). This inquiry reveals assessment’s role in sustaining or potentially disrupting entrenched views of what constitutes acceptable writing by examining how such views confer power on particular practices (134-35).

In West-Puckett’s classroom in a “mid-size, rural university in the south” with a high percentage of students of color and first-generation college students (135), small groups of students chose outcomes from the various outcomes statements, developed “visual symbols” for the badges, created a description of the components and value of the outcomes for writing, and detailed the “evidence” that applicants could present from a range of literacy practices to earn the badges (137). West-Puckett hoped that this process would decrease the “disconnect” between her understanding of the outcomes and that of students (136), as well as engage students in a process that takes into account the “lived consequences of assessment” (141): its disparate impact on specific groups.

The case study examines several examples of badges, such as one using a compass to represent “rhetorical knowledge” (138). The group generated multimodal presentations, and applicants could present evidence in a range of forms, including work done outside of the classroom (138-39). The students in the group decided whether or not to award the badge.

West-Puckett details the degree to which the process invited “lively discussion” by examining the “Editing MVP” badge (139). Students defined editing as proofreading and correcting one’s own paper but visually depicted two people working together. The group refused the badge to a student of color because of grammatical errors but awarded it to another student who argued for the value of using non-standard dialogue to show people “‘speaking real’ to each other” (qtd. in West-Puckett 140). West-Puckett recounts the classroom discussion of whether editing could be a collaborative effort and when and in what contexts correctness matters (140).

In Fall 2015, West-Puckett implemented “Digital Badging 2.0” in response to her concerns about “the limited construct of good writing some students clung to” as well as how to develop “badging economies that asserted [her] own expertise as a writing instructor while honoring the experiences, viewpoints, and subject positions of student writers” (142). She created two kinds of badging activities, one carried out by students as before, the other for her own assessment purposes. Students had to earn all the student-generated badges in order to pass, and a given number of West-Puckett’s “Project Badges” to earn particular grades (143). She states that she privileges “engagement as opposed to competency or mastery” (143). She maintains that this dual process, in which her decision-making process is shared with the students who are simultaneously grappling with the concepts, invites dialogue while allowing her to consider a wide range of rhetorical contexts and literacy practices over time (144).

West-Puckett reports that although she found evidence that the badging component did provide students an opportunity to take more control of their learning, as a whole the classes did not “enjoy” badging (145). They expressed concern about the extra work, the lack of traditional grades, and the responsibility involved in meeting the project’s demands (145). However, in disaggregated responses, students of color and lower-income students viewed the badge component favorably (145). According to West-Puckett, other scholars have similarly found that students in these groups value “alternative assessment models” (146).

West-Puckett lays out seven principles that she believes should guide participatory assessment, foregrounding the importance of making the processes “open and accessible to learners” in ways that “allow learners to accept or refuse particular identities that are constructed through the assessment” (147). In addition, “[a]ssessment artifacts,” in this case badges, should be “portable” so that students can use them beyond the classroom to demonstrate learning (148). She presents badges as an assessment tool that can embody these principles.


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Cohn, Jenae. “Devilish Smartphones” and Students’ Online Practices. C&C, Dec. 2016. Posted 11/10/2016.

Cohn, Jenae. “‘Devilish Smartphones’ and the ‘Stone-Cold’ Internet: Implications of the Technology Addiction Trope in College Student Digital Literacy Narratives.” Computers and Composition 42 (2016): 80-94. Web. 01 Nov. 2016.

Jenae Cohn analyzes student attitudes toward online and social-media interactions, arguing that student “skepticism about how social media impacts their relationships and literacy practices” (91) has not been adequately studied in computers and writing research (83). In general, Cohn states, composition theorists and instructors believe that online media should be included in writing curricula but have not taken into account how students themselves see their use of digital communication and literacy tools (91).

She examined 75 “digital literacy narratives” from first-year students at a large California research university with a majority Asian/Pacific Islander or White population. She found that 35 of the 75 students preferred face-to-face “embodied” interactions over digital ones while another 15 were “ambivalent” (82).

Keyword searches revealed the prevalence of the “addiction” trope when students discussed uncertainty about their online activities (82). While “addiction” was not the most common keyword (most common was “technology,” followed by “computer” and “Facebook), Cohn states that it was the most common word with a “clear affective charge” (82). Cohn details case studies of four students whose narratives about their use of social media employed the “addiction” trope (82).

Cohn explores the possibility that adults have created and spread the trope that teens are addicted to social media and notes as well that “addiction” is one of a set of powerful “popular tropes” that permeates discussions of media use (91). She argues that the adoption of this trope by the student writers reflects a true student concern rather than a effort by adults to, in the view of danah boyd, “gain control over a space that teenagers have claimed for themselves” (cited in Cohn 83).

Similarly, Cohn reviews criticism of the literacy narrative as a possible invitation to students to produce attitudes that they think mirror their teachers’ views of social media use as an interference with more serious writing (85). She contends, however, that taking the narratives “at face value” provides insights into how “myriad ideological influences” have impacted student views (85). She hopes as well that her own digital literacy narrative assignment will allow her a glimpse of how students who are presumed to be “‘digital natives’ . . . actually see themselves” (84).

In her view, her examination of these narratives suggests that the students she studied have accepted a common assumption that face-to-face interaction is inherently better than mediated communication like the kind required by social media (84). In this kind of narrative, Cohn writes, the shift to a “new technology” entails what Marita Sturken and Douglas Thomas characterize as a sense of “loss of connectivity, of intimacy, of desire, of authenticity in some way” (qtd. in Cohn 85; emphasis original). Moreover, according to Cohn, students see digital and “embodied” communication as binaries, generally rejecting the possibility of overlap (84).

Examining especially narratives that focus on cellphone use, Cohn distinguishes between two types of addiction narratives. In her view, the “distraction” narrative presents virtual communication as functioning to extract users from “real” experience, substituting less authentic relationships (88). As an example of a student’s concerns about cellphone use, Cohn presents “Lisa,” who, on a trip to London, decided that her desperation to stay connected online left her unable to remember any details of her London experience. Only after curtailing her phone use did Lisa claim to able to participate in what she saw as the “normal” life superseded by her phone use (86-87).

Cohn notes Lisa’s “clear bifurcation” (87) between her digital life and her embodied one. Recalling the trip, Lisa does not mention any use of her phone to take pictures to help her recall events. Cohn suggests that a cellphone might also have allowed a student like Lisa to share pictures with friends in an embodied social setting (87).

“Jack,” author of another “distraction” narrative, also laments the power of the phone to interfere with what he casts as “normal” life (87). Thinking he would use the phone for schoolwork, he claims that he soon found himself playing games and listening to music. Jack ultimately settles into a more nuanced view in which his inability to stay away from the phone “sham[es]” him (88) but also in which he tacitly acknowledges the usefulness of the phone for maintaining connections (89). Cohn posits that Jack is “nostalg[ic]” for a life without the rhetorical complexities imposed by digital communication; Jack insists on the importance of maintaining a sense of an embodied self not entangled with his online persona (89).

Cohn emphasizes the degree to which these two students saw themselves as completely passive before the power of their phones to distract them (88). Authors of the second kind of addiction narrative Cohn analyses, the “loner” narrative, also tend to see themselves as controlled by the technology and “pathologiz[e]” cellphone use (90) as a deviation from what they see as the normalcy of embodied life (89-90). In this kind of narrative, virtual interaction actually threatens normal existence (89). “Loner” narratives present the availability of cellphones as a temptation to “avoid face-to-face interactions” (89) and to “compensate” for “shy behavior” that is seen as “a source of shame” (90).

“Carly” sees herself as addicted to texting because she finds it emotionally easier than face-to-face interaction, while “Albert” describes himself as unable to articulate verbally in a classroom, isolating himself instead in a darkened room where he addictively communicates with strangers online (89-90). Both of these students arrive at a conclusion that virtual devices have benefits but that fellow students should seek “balance” (89). According to Cohn, they continue to endorse the view that “fluency in face-to-face interactions is more normative than fluency in online interactions” (90).

Cohn argues that writing teachers should teach critical literacy before assigning literacy narratives so that students can be more aware of how popular tropes can influence their conclusions about their literacy experiences (91). She notes that teachers should be alert to the ongoing rhetorical framing of literacy practices so that prompts can elicit more nuanced observations and attention to how different communication modes can accord with the exigencies of differing contexts (92). The article provides specific suggestions for classroom activities that can help students see both the distinctions and overlap among the different communicative practices they employ and can encourage them to value a wide range of skills (92).

 


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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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Zuidema and Fredricksen. Preservice Teachers’ Use of Resources. August RTE. Posted 09/25/2016.

Zuidema, Leah A., and James E. Fredricksen. “Resources Preservice Teachers Use to Think about Student Writing.” Research in the Teaching of English 51.1 (2016): 12-36. Print.

Leah A. Zuidema and James E. Fredricksen document the resources used by students in teacher-preparation programs. The study examined transcripts collected from VoiceThread discussions among 34 preservice teachers (PSTs) (16). The PSTs reviewed and discussed papers provided by eighth- and ninth-grade students in Idaho and Indiana (18).

Zuidema and Fredricksen define “resource” as “an aid or source of evidence used to help support claims; an available supply that can be drawn upon when needed” (15). They intend their study to move beyond determining what writing teachers “get taught” to discovering what kinds of resources PSTs actually use in developing their theories and practices for K-12 writing classrooms (13-14).

The literature review suggests that the wide range of concepts and practices presented in teacher-preparation programs varies depending on local conditions and is often augmented by students’ own educational experiences (14). The authors find very little systematic study of how beginning teachers actually draw on the methods and concepts their training provides (13).

Zuidema and Fredricksen see their study as building on prior research by systematically identifying the resources teachers use and assigning them to broad categories to allow a more comprehensive understanding of how teachers use such sources to negotiate the complexities of teaching writing (15-16).

To gather data, the researchers developed a “community of practice” by building their methods courses around a collaborative project focusing on assessing writing across two different teacher-preparation programs (16-17). Twenty-six Boise State University PSTs and 8 from a small Christian college, Dordt, received monthly sets of papers from the eighth and ninth graders, which they then assessed individually and with others at their own institutions.

The PSTs then worked in groups through VoiceThread to respond to the papers in three “rounds,” first “categoriz[ing]” the papers according to strengths and weaknesses; then categorizing and prioritizing the criteria they relied on; and finally “suggest[ing] a pedagogical plan of action” (19). This protocol did not explicitly ask PSTs to name the resources they used but revealed these resources via the transcriptions (19).

The methods courses taught by Zuidema and Fredricksen included “conceptual tools” such as “guiding frameworks, principles, and heuristics,” as well as “practical tools” like “journal writing and writer’s workshop” (14). PSTs read professional sources and participated in activities that emphasized the value of sharing writing with students (17). Zuidema and Fredricksen contend that a community of practice in which professionals explain their reasoning as they assess student writing encourages PSTs to “think carefully about theory-practice connections” (18).

In coding the VoiceThread conversations, the researchers focused on “rhetorical approaches to composition” (19), characterized as attention to “arguments and claims . . . , evidence and warrants,” and “sources of support” (20). They found five categories of resources PSTs used to support claims about student writing:

  • Understanding of students and student writing (9% of instances)
  • Knowledge of the context (10%)
  • Colleagues (11%)
  • PSTs’ roles as writers, readers, and teachers (17%)
  • PSTs’ ideas and observations about writing (54%) (21)

In each case, Zuidema and Fredricksen developed subcategories. For example, “Understanding of students and student writing” included “Experience as a student writer” and “Imagining students and abilities,” while “Colleagues” consisted of “Small-group colleagues,” “More experienced teachers,” “Class discussion/activity,” and “Professional reading” (23).

Category 1, “Understanding of students and student writing,” was used “least often,” with PSTs referring to their own student-writing experiences only six times out of 435 recorded instances (24). The researchers suggest that this category might have been used more had the PSTs been able to interact with the students (24). They see “imagining” how students are reacting to assignments important as a “way [teachers] can develop empathy” and develop interest in how students understand writing (24).

Category 2, “Knowledge of Context as a Resource,” was also seldom used. Those who did refer to it tended to note issues involving what Zuidema and Fredricksen call GAPS: rhetorical awareness of “genre, audience, purpose, and situation of the writing” (25). Other PSTs noted the role of the prompt in inviting strong writing. The researchers believe these types of awarenesses encourage more sophisticated assessment of student work (25).

The researchers express surprise that Category 3, “Colleagues,” was used so seldom (26). Colleagues in the small groups were cited most often, but despite specific encouragement to do so, several groups did not draw on this resource. Zuidema and Fredricksen note that reference to the resource increased through the three rounds. Also surprising was the low rate of reference to mentors and experienced teachers, to class discussion, activities, and assignments: Only one participant mentioned a required “professional reading” as a resource (27). Noting that the PSTs may have used concepts from mentors and class assignments without explicitly naming them, the authors note prior research suggesting that reference to outside sources can be perceived as undercutting the authority conferred by experience (27).

In Category 4, “Roles as Resources,” Zuidema and Fredricksen note that PSTs were much more likely to draw on their roles as readers or teachers than as writers (28). Arguing that a reader perspective augured an awareness of the importance of audience, the researchers note that most PSTs in their study perceived their own individual reader responses as most pertinent, suggesting the need to emphasize varied perspectives readers might bring to a text (28).

Fifty-four percent of the PSTs references invoked “Writing as a Resource” (29). Included in this category were “imagined ideal writing,” “comparisons across student writing,” “holistic” references to “whole texts,” and “excerpts” (29-31). In these cases, PSTs’ uses of the resources ranged from “a rigid, unrhetorical view of writing” in which “rules” governed assessment (29) to a more effective practice that “connected [student writing] with a rhetorical framework” (29). For example, the use of excerpts could be used for “keeping score” on “checklists” or as a means of noting patterns and suggesting directions for teaching (31). Comparisons among students and expectations for other students at similar ages, Zuidema and Fredricksen suggest, allowed some PSTs to reflect on developmental issues, while holistic evaluation allowed consideration of tone, audience, and purpose (30).

Zuidema and Fredricksen conclude that in encouraging preservice teachers to draw on a wide range of resources, “exposure was not enough” (32), and “[m]ere use is not the goal” (33). Using their taxonomy as a teaching tool, they suggest, may help PSTs recognize the range of resources available to them and “scaffold their learning” (33) so that they will be able to make informed decisions when confronted with the multiple challenges inherent in today’s diverse and sometimes “impoverished” contexts for teaching writing (32).


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Webb-Sunderhaus, Sara. “Tellability” and Identity Performance. Sept. CE, 2016. Posted 09/18/2016.

Webb-Sunderhaus, Sara. “‘Keep the Appalachian, Drop the Redneck’: Tellable Student Narratives of Appalachian Identity.” College English 79.1 (2016): 11-33. Print.

Sara Webb-Sunderhaus explores the concept of “tellability” as a means of understanding how students in composition classes perform identities. She argues that these identities often emerge from the relationship between their individual experiences and public discourses validated by the audiences they are likely to encounter.

Webb-Sunderhaus’s specific focus is the construction of identity by people who designate themselves or are designated by others as “Appalachian.” Self-identifying as an “Urban Appalachian”—that is, as an individual who has moved out of a region considered part of Appalachia to a larger city (13, 31n5), Webb-Sunderhaus conducted an ethnographic study at two anonymous institutions in Appalachia (13). She examines the classroom activity, written work, and responses to interviews of six students in writing classes at these institutions in light of the students’ connection to Appalachia.

Webb-Sunderhaus presents contested definitions of Appalachia, including those of the Appalachian Regional Council and the Central Appalachian Network, both of which use geographical measures (14). In contrast, Webb-Sunderhaus cites Benedict Anderson’s definition of Appalachia as “an imagined community” (qtd. in Webb-Sunderhaus14), and that of Appalachian Studies scholar Allen Batteau as “a literary and a political invention rather than a geographical discovery” (qtd. in Webb-Sunderhaus14). Webb-Sunderhaus argues that efforts to define Appalachianness may miss the diversity of individuals who identify with the region; she stresses that this identity is “a cultural identity, rooted in the place of the Appalachian mountains, but not necessarily restricted to this place alone” (16).

Tellability, a concept used by scholars in social studies and folklore, involves the relationship between a particular narrative and widespread public discourses about a given phenomenon, in this case, Appalachianness (16). These public discourses determine which narratives accord with common assumptions and widely shared impressions of the phenomenon. A narrative that is tellable fits and reinforces the extant public narratives; accounts that resist these public narratives may not earn what Michael Kearns calls “the audience’s active validation” (16) and are therefore not tellable (16-17). Tellability, Webb-Sunderhaus maintains, is a function of audience. Writers and speakers are aware of the discourses their audiences expect based on the given rhetorical constraints; what is tellable in one context may be untellable in another (22).

This process of negotiating identities through astute choices of tellable narratives, Webb-Sunderhaus writes, accords with Judith Butler’s view of identity as “a performance that is repeated” by “a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already established” (Butler, qtd. in Webb-Sunderhaus 17). Tellable narratives provide what Debra Journet calls “tropes of authenticity” necessary to such re-enactment (qtd. in Webb-Sunderhaus 21).

Webb-Sunderhaus interprets her study of how tellability influences students’ rhetorical decisions as they perform identities in a classroom setting as evidence that students exhibit considerable awareness of what kinds of narratives are tellable and that in a number of cases, these decisions were based on what the students assumed the instructor expected (29). In one case, a student “fabricated” details (23) to conform to what she saw as the teacher’s belief that affinity with nature is a feature of Appalachianness; in contrast, the reality of the student’s childhood did not meet this expectation and was therefore an untellable response to an essay assignment (23-24).

Drawing on Nedra Reynolds, Webb-Sunderhaus notes a distinction between “perceived” and “conceived” spaces as components of identity. A perceived space designates physical surroundings that can be apprehended through the senses, such as the landscape of Appalachia, while a conceived space is the way an environment is represented mentally, incorporating sociocultural components, attitudes, and values (20).

Students in Webb-Sunderhaus’s study, she writes, exhibited an understanding of this distinction, noting ways in which being born in or from Appalachia often contrasted with their relationship to Appalachia as individuals. One student acknowledged being physically linked to Appalachia but rejected even some of the “positive” stereotypes she felt were culturally associated with the region (25). Another specifically disconnected her Appalachian birthplace and subsequent experiences, arguing that tellable narratives of Appalachians as tied to place did not represent her own willingness to “explore the world” (“Gladys,” qtd. in Webb-Sunderhaus 26).

Webb-Sunderhaus sees in this type of resistance to common tellable narratives a form of what Ann K. Ferrell calls “stigma management” (28). Many tellable narratives of Appalachia focus on negatives like poverty, illiteracy, narrow-mindedness, and even criminality and incest (18). In Webb-Sunderhaus’s view, resistance to an Appalachian identity defined by such narratives can act as a distancing strategy when such narratives are invoked (28). At the same time, according to Webb-Sunderhaus, the student who rejected the “down-home” component of an Appalachian identity may have recognized that in the setting of a research study, her more cosmopolitan identity narrative would be tellable in a way that it might not be in other contexts (28).

Webb-Sunderhaus emphasizes the power of teachers in “inviting” and approving particular narratives (28). For example, she writes that by picking up on a student’s reluctant reference to moonshining in his family history and sharing a similar family history, she encouraged him to incorporate this component of the public discourse about Appalachia into his own identity (21). Similarly, the student who embellished her narrative was praised by the teacher for her “imagery and pastoralism” (qtd. in Webb-Sunderhaus 22); such responses, Webb-Sunderhaus contends, quoting Thomas Newkirk, reveal “the seductiveness of deeply rooted and deeply satisfying narratives that place us in familiar moral positions” (qtd. in Webb-Sunderhaus 24).

The power of this seductiveness, in Webb-Sunderhaus’s view, creates rhetorical pressure on students who are asked to perform identities in writing classrooms. While teachers hope that students will produce writing that authentically represents their views and experiences, the authenticity and “reliability” of a performance can easily be judged by its adherence to the common and therefore tellable public discourses in which the teacher may be immersed (28-29). Responding to Zan Meyer Gonçalves, Webb-Sunderhaus writes that the hope of making a classroom a place where students can “feel honest and safe” (qtd. in Webb-Sunderhaus 29) may overlook the degree to which students’ educational histories have led them to make strategic decisions (29) about how to “negotiate successfully [a] particular literacy event” (24).

In this view, the kinds of clichéd endorsements of popular discourses that teachers would like to see students overcome may be among the options the teachers are inadvertently inviting as they convey their own sense that some narratives are tellable in their classrooms while others are not (30).