Misunderstanding the Assignment

I am using Doug Hunt's Misunderstanding the Assignment in my TA Strategies Class this fall, and just finished re-reading the book. Now I need to remind myself why I decided to use it!

1. Accessibility: The TAs I have taught the last three years have often struggled with the more traditional academic article approach, or even the collections of essays I have tried. They have particularly been mystified by the debates the articles are often a part of. Perhaps steering away from the debate is going to turn out to be a bad idea, but I thought I would try a book that doesn't try to argue strongly for a position so much as try to increase readers' understanding of what happens in a first-year composition course.

2. Relevance: What could be more relevant than "seeing" how somebody else negotiated a semester of teaching first-year composition? I started to record my classes last semester, but I ran into some technical difficulties, and I was not capturing the students' perspectives. The 11 person research team was able to capture classroom data, student interview data, instructor interview data, and author analysis.

Upon re-reading it, and thinking about it as a teacher of teachers, I'm thinking about the following complications and possibilities.

1. The course taught isn't very much like the course we teach at NDSU. It seems to be a cultural studies class of sorts, asking students to analyze TV shows about the family, read and analyze free will in pieces of fiction. A syllabus and assignment sheets would have been a nice addition to the book. The big ideas are front and center, the teaching of writing happens inductively through workshops, conferences, and "Mr. Paragraph" classes. I do think this difference will turn out to be valuable in the long run, but the new TAs might have preferred to "see" a course more like ours.

2. I am excited about the possibility of "re-playing" some classroom scenes and some 1-on-1 conferences. I'm not saying the teacher handled situations incorrectly, but the book gives real situations (students in class who keep asking "what do you want?"; students in conferences who say little or nothing) that we might try to role play to give the new TAs (and me!) other strategies for handling these common situations.

3. I would like to design a smaller scale study modeled on this book. I have only 4 new TAs to work with, and they are primarily engaged in the process of learning how to teach, but I want to try and introduce them to the scholarship of teaching and specifically classroom research. My interest in computers and writing has me thinking that I would like to research the most overtly technologized assignments in English 120 and see to how our students are understanding them. I would probably ask the new TAs to function as the eyes and ears in my class (to put me under the microscope, rather than them), to conduct one interview with a select # of students, and probably to survey the 120 class as a whole. I used this mixed methodology with TAs two years ago and we published "What's Going On?"; maybe this year's cohort can develop another article.

A quick search revealed that Misunderstanding the Assignment was reviewed in Composition Studies and College English, but it doesn't seem to have made much of an impact on the field. I think its project is worth extending--good book.

Saving the ruined essay

Ever since I messed up the essay that I blogged about just before Christmas (or, technically, ever since I finished messing up that essay in and around January 1), I have been thinking about how to save it and strengthen it. This time, I think I have the right things figured out.

I know I need to do some cutting and trimming, but I was also feeling like the essay was not fully engaged in the right kinds of conversation, not fully engaged in an the ongoing conversation about reading generally, and reading new media specifically. I just read Patricia Harkin's CCC essay on the history of reader-response theory; I think that is the conversation I need to hook up with. She points out near the end that compositionists excluded reading from composition courses as they asserted rhetoric and writing as subjects worthy of study (and professionalization), but in the early part of the 21st century, considerable cultural anxiety about students' poor reading abilities, and anxiety about students' inability to read the changing communicative environment (the visual, the remixed, the fragmentary), gives me an entree into "seriously visible" reading (that phrase being part of the title).

Guess I should just go work on the paper, not blog about it.