What drives changes in writing course curriculum?
I am doing the first phase of a project on the history of a first year writing course. It's mostly document analysis of the founding documents of the course (recommendations from a curriculum committee, a proposal for the course, and ten years of syllabi of the course). The next phase will involve interviews with the people responsible for the syllabi (I hope).
I haven't found much in the literature on this -- historical studies of university writing courses, but I'm sure there must exist something like this out there -- and I find it fascinating.
When I started the project I proposed that it would be about the pedagogical, theoretical, and disciplinary influences on the way the course has changed its teaching and assessment methods over the years.
I was told again and again, though, that this didn't make sense because the idea that these things are the primary drivers of change is misguided. At first I didn't get it, or refused to go along with this idea. I still think that the way someone is trained, or the ideologies they bring with them about writing or teaching or language (which in academia are shaped in part by what disciplinary communities you align yourself with -- who you read) matter a lot when it comes to how the teaching of writing is actually carried out, and I probably will get to this eventually.
But now that I've been working (properly working, not as a grad student) at a university for about a year, I am starting to understand this. This must be incredibly obvious to anyone with more experience than I have, but I see now that:
Local and institutional social/political/ideological factors drive curriculum/ pedagogy/assessment more than "current theory and research" in a discipline drive these things -- for a few reasons, but mostly because the people at the top who make the decisions have different ideas and priorities than the people at the bottom who actually work with students.
This doesn't only affect how we teach and assess, etc (though this is important and something I need to learn more about for my project), but it affects who is teaching and assessing etc, and this is important I think.
At my own institution (well before my time) there have been administrative decisions which resulted in, among other things, the dissolution of a writing center, the creation of two subsequent writing-focused units that folded into other units and eventually disappeared, the implementation of a writing-intensive learning initiative which gradually lost its administrative infrastructure but still remains on the books, the re-emergence of student writing services in a new unit, and the establishment of an English-language support-focused unit (which seems to be part of a shift in the discourse I'm seeing across certainly my own geographical context if not more widely, from universities perceiving a need for 'writing support' to 'language support,' which is mostly a good thing but brings of some interesting and contentious issues when it comes to disciplinary divisions of labour).
All or most these decisions resulted in people being hired or losing their jobs, in instructors getting or not getting help doing their jobs, in students having or not having access to more help with their writing. In other words, these decisions added and subtracted people who bring with them all the stuff I talked about in the 4th paragraph above.
Anyhoo...more on this later, I hope.
I haven't found much in the literature on this -- historical studies of university writing courses, but I'm sure there must exist something like this out there -- and I find it fascinating.
When I started the project I proposed that it would be about the pedagogical, theoretical, and disciplinary influences on the way the course has changed its teaching and assessment methods over the years.
I was told again and again, though, that this didn't make sense because the idea that these things are the primary drivers of change is misguided. At first I didn't get it, or refused to go along with this idea. I still think that the way someone is trained, or the ideologies they bring with them about writing or teaching or language (which in academia are shaped in part by what disciplinary communities you align yourself with -- who you read) matter a lot when it comes to how the teaching of writing is actually carried out, and I probably will get to this eventually.
But now that I've been working (properly working, not as a grad student) at a university for about a year, I am starting to understand this. This must be incredibly obvious to anyone with more experience than I have, but I see now that:
Local and institutional social/political/ideological factors drive curriculum/ pedagogy/assessment more than "current theory and research" in a discipline drive these things -- for a few reasons, but mostly because the people at the top who make the decisions have different ideas and priorities than the people at the bottom who actually work with students.
This doesn't only affect how we teach and assess, etc (though this is important and something I need to learn more about for my project), but it affects who is teaching and assessing etc, and this is important I think.
At my own institution (well before my time) there have been administrative decisions which resulted in, among other things, the dissolution of a writing center, the creation of two subsequent writing-focused units that folded into other units and eventually disappeared, the implementation of a writing-intensive learning initiative which gradually lost its administrative infrastructure but still remains on the books, the re-emergence of student writing services in a new unit, and the establishment of an English-language support-focused unit (which seems to be part of a shift in the discourse I'm seeing across certainly my own geographical context if not more widely, from universities perceiving a need for 'writing support' to 'language support,' which is mostly a good thing but brings of some interesting and contentious issues when it comes to disciplinary divisions of labour).
All or most these decisions resulted in people being hired or losing their jobs, in instructors getting or not getting help doing their jobs, in students having or not having access to more help with their writing. In other words, these decisions added and subtracted people who bring with them all the stuff I talked about in the 4th paragraph above.
Anyhoo...more on this later, I hope.
"Students Suck and Are Horrible" - Professors
"Those of us who have been doomed to read manuscripts written in an examination room -- whether at a grammar school, a high school, or a college -- have found the work of even good scholars disfigured by bad spelling, confusing punctuation, ungrammatical, obscure, ambiguous, or inelegant expressions. Everyone who has had much to do with the graduating classes of our best colleges has known men who could not write a letter describing their commencement without making blunders which would disgrace a boy of twelve years old." - Adams Hill
Look, I get that it's frustrating to work with students who aren't into what you're teaching. It happens to all of us. And maybe I am naive. I have after all only been teaching at universities for nine years. But I am still sometimes amazed at the negative attitude toward students' writing and linguistic abilities that appears to be the default view of many university faculty.
It isn't that some, or even many, university students aren't "bad at writing," if by "bad at writing" we mean something like "don't meet the expectations of excellent writing by undergraduates in their field." But of course, that's not what people usually mean -- they mean "bad at writing" in the sense of "based on my cobbled-together idiosyncratic understanding of what 'good writing' is," which for most people (including me!) is so maddeningly vague as to be irrelevant.
I have heard more than once since I started at my current institution, from more than one senior academic with presumably years of experience teaching young people, that students "can't write." This is often applied to "international students," but then whoever says this usually follows it up with some version of "it's not just international students -- there are plenty of native speakers who can't write at all!"
Three things come to mind.
First, the assertion that "students can't write" has literally been conventional wisdom since people started caring about "university writing" as a thing. Guess when Adams Hill, who ran entrance exams for Harvard, wrote the quote at the top of this post? In 1879, a hundred and thirty seven years ago, that's when. So: either all students, from the young white dudes at Harvard of the late 19th century to the Canadian immigrants of the early 21st, have been always and forever horrible at writing since the dawn of time, or this is that thing our professors warned us about: a discourse.
Second, and this is something I have trouble understanding maybe because I am a language person and not a "content" person (which doesn't really make sense but whatever), I'm interested in what I perceive as the personal offense or even anger with which faculty seem to talk about this topic. Here are some quotes from the media from professors at my own institution:
"The grammar sucks and the writing is awful...There’s this emphasis on expressing yourself, on this idea that if you get it on the page, it will be fine.... It’s not.” (1)
" ...insofar as [ESL] students are academically or linguistically unprepared to enter the broad cultural debates that animate the educational conversation, their presence in the graduate classroom and in some cases, their receipt of Canadian credentials, occurs to the detriment of the Canadian students and institutions." (2)
These are just two (relatively different) examples of how faculty talk about students. There are a lot of other things you'll hear every day on campus. I'm not necessarily taking it upon myself to "combat" those who seem to be unduly dismissive of student writing (though I have been known to use the phrase "this is what we're up against" from time to time with colleagues). I think this attitude itself needs to be studied; people like me should look more into why faculty feel this way, how language ideology works in the university, and so on.
Third, I have to say, as a teacher of what might elsewhere be called "basic writing": my students, the vast majority of them, can write. They know how to make sentences and paragraphs and even essays. I would estimate that in any given class of eighteen students there are one or maybe two students whose basic grasp of syntax and/or vocabulary feels to me like it has the potential to cause them serious problems throughout their university career if they don't attend to it assiduously*.
This is just how I feel, by the way -- there are empirical questions about students' writing/language ability that can be answered (and some have been) , vis-a-vis their success in later studies or the workforce or whatever. But why do I think my students can write when some of my colleagues don't? Am I wrong? Or could it be that someone like me, whose career is devoted to studying and teaching English language and writing to university students, is worth listening to on these questions?
[* Incidentally, part of my current work at my institution is with a unit that is charged with helping these students, and that is what we are trying to do. But it's not "students" who "can't write." It's maybe 10% of students.]
Thought Questions: "Language support" vs "Writing support?"
“ESL” vs. “Writing” infrastructures (or ad hoc 'solutions') : Where does expertise and responsibility for working with L2 speakers/learners/writers lie in an institution?
Let's say an institution has a writing centre and an (English) language centre (e.g., Centre for Applied English Studies @ Hong Kong U, Official Languages & Bilingualism Institute @ U Ottawa). Who "works with" second language students, and how?
Do writing centres incorporate second language pedagogies into their ethos & training?
Does the institution develop a mindset of L1 students go to X services, L2 students go to Y?
Does differentiating between "monolingual L1" students and "multilingual L2 students" become more or less necessary?
What is the relationship between writing programs and ESL support initiatives?
What is a university looking for when they identify language support as an area of need, and there are already writing programs in place?
How do writing program administrators trained in a humanistic English studies milieu incorporate theory, research, and pedagogy from second language studies/applied linguistics?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of hiring "applied linguists" vs. "writing specialists" to work with L2 student writers?
Are disciplinary divisions between "TESOL" and "writing" a help or a hindrance for delivering student support services?
How effective are university-wide generic "writing" or "language services" vs. more Faculty or department specific support?
Plurilingualism vs Multilingualism vs Translingualism
Plurlingualism seems to be the emerging theoretical construct of choice in Canada for the move away from "English-only"-type orientations to ELT. I don't know whether this is happening in the US but I suspect it is not. Below is a brief survey of some recent theoretical work on the terms multilingual, plurilingual, and translingual.
I remain encouraged by yet slightly skeptical of all of these. I think there needs to be a better understanding of how (and even whether!) people come to understand themselves as multi/plurilingual and especially as monolingual. I've said before that applied linguistics may need a "monolingual studies" analogous to "whiteness studies" in other fields, but that might be a bridge too far...
Coste, Moore, Zarate: multilingualism describes societies, plurilingualism describes peoples' use of language.
Moore: plurlingual and translingual are basically the same thing and are described in opposition to multilingualism which describes "separate competences in fixed and labelled languages"
Canagarajah - Translingual practice is an umbrella term which describes a number of 'newer' approaches to language that deviate from traditionally monolingually-oriented linguistics; a translingual orientation is therefore in opposition to monolingual orientation. (I would imagine that he and perhaps others would argue that the traditional understanding of "multlilingual" is actually based on a monolingualist orientation to language.)
Taylor & Snoddon - these terms are basically all the same -- plurilingualism, translingualism, polylanguaging, and even multlilingualism are all ways of describing the trend of embracing "other languages" in TESOL.
I remain encouraged by yet slightly skeptical of all of these. I think there needs to be a better understanding of how (and even whether!) people come to understand themselves as multi/plurilingual and especially as monolingual. I've said before that applied linguistics may need a "monolingual studies" analogous to "whiteness studies" in other fields, but that might be a bridge too far...
Coste, Moore, Zarate: multilingualism describes societies, plurilingualism describes peoples' use of language.
the focus on the individual as the locus and actor of contact encouraged a shift of terminology, from multilingualism (the study of societal contact) to plurilingualism.
Moore: plurlingual and translingual are basically the same thing and are described in opposition to multilingualism which describes "separate competences in fixed and labelled languages"
Plurilingualism does not describe separate competences in fixed and labelled languages, but views languages as ”mobile resources” (Blommaert, 2010, p.43) within an integrated repertoire (Lüdi & Py, 2009) that can include translingual practice (Canagarajah, 2013).
Canagarajah - Translingual practice is an umbrella term which describes a number of 'newer' approaches to language that deviate from traditionally monolingually-oriented linguistics; a translingual orientation is therefore in opposition to monolingual orientation. (I would imagine that he and perhaps others would argue that the traditional understanding of "multlilingual" is actually based on a monolingualist orientation to language.)
I adopt the umbrella term translingual practice to capture the common underlying processes and orientations motivating these communicative modes.
Taylor & Snoddon - these terms are basically all the same -- plurilingualism, translingualism, polylanguaging, and even multlilingualism are all ways of describing the trend of embracing "other languages" in TESOL.
The time is ripe as there is a palpable zeitgeist and related (if separate) manifestations of plurilingualism, whether they are termed thusly or as translingualism, polylanguaging, or simply multilingualism. Indeed the four books reviewed in this special issue....all touch on various aspects of, and research on, the role and value of learners' and teachers' first languages and additional languages, and policies that support plurilingual repertoires in relation to English teaching and learning. We hope practitioners and researchers alike will find much on offer here to enhance their understanding of language teaching and learning.
Everything I Have Ever Written About Weezer and the Rentals, Including Things I Wrote in College, 2000-2015
What is it about Rivers Cuomo and Matt Sharp that makes my word count runneth over? I'm not sure I know any more. At first it was because I loved their music, and now maybe it's because I measure myself against the way I used to feel about their music, the changes and gaps between now and then. Anyway, here is a list of sixteen pieces I have written during the last fifteen years. I can't promise this list is finished, either. I keep hoping that one day I will be able to wash my hands of this whole business. But I kind of doubt it.
Weezer: Our Hope for the Future
(2001)
Written as Weezer was beginning to emerge from their 1997-2001 hiatus. This was the height of my obsession with the band, obviously, and a setup for the anguish and heartbreak that was to come. I really believed that Weezer was going to save popular music. I was wrong.
Review of Weezer (the green album) (2001)
The disappointment begins. Waited in line at midnight to buy with record with Gwen and Sarah at Sonic Boom in Fremont (RIP), even though I had already heard the mp3s and gotten a promo copy of it. Saul really was singing "Island in the Sun" all the time.
I bought Maladriot at an HMV in Bath, UK the day it came out. I kind of fell in love with it during the rest of my trip, even though I also thought it was pretty bad. My friend Brian and I sat at the back of the our study-tour bus and belted out the lyrics to "Take Control." We were also really into Andrew WK for a few months, so it kind of fit in with the whole feel of the trip.
Matt Sharp: From Weezer to Quiet Troubadour (2003)
I interviewed Matt Sharp for Paste during his super-low-key comeback tour. The music was really long, slow, and boring, but I liked it. This was the first of three times I have interviewed Sharp. To be diplomatic: it is not easy to pull out coherent quotes from these interviews.
Review of Make Believe (2005)
I don't know who I wrote this review for, but it was never published except for on this blog.
Please Let that Be You: The Return of the Rentals, Seriously
(2006)
Not unlike the piece I wrote during the Weezer hiatus, this piece for the Portland Mercury (from a phone interview with Sharp after the first reunited Rentals tour began) is mostly me thinking that maybe a band that made two of my favorite records is going to make some great music. Once again, I may not have been entirely right.
Review of the Last Little Life EP (2007)
I'm pretty sure this is an accurate assessment of the first recording by the Rentals mk II, who disappeared almost as quickly as they were assembled.
Last Little Life (2007)
This show preview for the Inlander is similar to the
Mercury piece, except I was more skeptical. Again based on a phone interview. Their show in Spokane was the last one I went to before moving to China, and also the time I realized that rock and roll shows were no longer as important to me as they used to be.
Review of Rivers Cuomo's Alone (2007)
Yes, I am the totally cliche Weezer fan who hates Weezer, and only likes obscure unreleased things they did between 1994 and 1998.
"Three Simultaneous Single from Weezer" (2008)
Trying to figure out if the red album was going to be the mythical "return to form" everyone had been expecting for 10 years.
Review of Weezer (the red album) (2008)
A review of Weezer's almost good third s/t album.
Review of Songs About Time (2009)
The Rentals are getting better, I think -- I haven't listened to the thing as a whole record yet, but I'm liking many of the individual songs. Songs About Time is also an interesting look at what happens when the music industry implodes and you resurrect a band that existed during the height of the CD era.
Notice I have not even really tried to make a value judgement about the latest Weezer record. The single is fantastic, but the rest of the record, well ... I simply can't evaluate it. It's beyond "good" or "bad."
She Says It's All Right (2009)
A short personal essay about (what else?) being a teenager, love, girls, ambivalence, and the Rentals, which I started writing almost five years ago, now up at Good Letters.
"From 'Only in Dreams' to "The Angel and the One'" (2014)
Tracing Rivers Cuomo's yearning from high school romance to enlightened meditator.
An Absurd, Elaborate, and Imaginary Alternative History of Weezer, 2000-2014 (2015)
An ill-advised attempt to re-imagine Weezer's career if the cranky fans had gotten their way.
When Basic Writing is Not Basic Writing: Notes on FAL
Quick thoughts on something I'm trying to devote some mental energy to, in the hopes of eventually doing some serious work on it:
I teach in a course called Foundations of Academic Literacy. It's the type of course that would easily be considered "Basic Writing" in the US, but it's very divorced from the origins of "Basic Writing" as I understand them.
(It's very likely that many writing courses that are at a 'foundational' or 'basic' or 'remedial' or 'preparatory' level also don't come from the same historical stream that traditional basic writing courses did, which was the open enrollments of the 1960s and 70s, and universities scrambling to 'deal with' students of the type they hadn't enrolled many of before, i.e. students from non-elite backgrounds. This is an oversimplification but if we look at CUNY in the 1970s and the way Mina Shaughnessy conceptualized the idea of BW, this is it in a nutshell.)
So, here's where FAL differs from BW:
1. There is no such thing as "first-year composition" -- in the sense of a required beginning college writing course for all students -- at my institution, nor is this a very common practice in almost all Canadian institutions. There are several reasons for this that are interesting but that I don't have time to get into (they have to do with, as usual, politics and ideologies in English departments). BW in the US is often understood as a "pre-FYC" course, but we have no FYC.
That being said -- and maybe this is point (1a), FAL was created as a kind of "pre-W" course; in other words, it was created to serve the needs of students who are deemed (though we can talk more about why they are so deemed) to not be "ready" for W-courses. The W-initiative, that is, a pretty straightforward implementation of disciplinary, writing-across-the-curriculum-inspired, genre-aware, writing-to-learn-enhanced courses, was implemented around ten years ago pretty successfully by a series of units staffed by rhet/comp specialists that have since completely disappeared from the university (the specialists and the units). So FAL does have a status as being "pre" - something, but the thing it is "pre" is multifarious.
Despite this difference -- which may or may not be a big one, practically -- the perceived need for FAL probably comes from the same place the perceived need for BW does: some students "aren't ready" for university writing for some reason, and they need to be.
2. Related: a quick-and-dirty understanding of why the students "aren't ready" relates back to the unique context from which FAL emerges as distinct from BW. While BW was considered a reaction to the influx of urban, working-class, ethnic minority (etc) American students in the 70s, FAL can be said to be a "reaction" to the unique cultural context of 21st century British Columbia, which includes both a recent influx of immigration (which certainly has been steady for many years, but seems to have picked up in the last 20 years especially) and a huge increase in international students at both the K-12 and university level, a trend that is very likely to continue for a variety of reasons. This maybe isn't that different from CUNY in the 70s, but the unique national and local contexts of Canada, BC, and the Vancouver area make the "issues" different.
One of the "issues" -- and maybe this is point (2a), is an much bigger emphasis on ESL (or EAL as it's usually called at my institution) in the local educational culture. Perhaps because of the waves of immigration we see here, the question of how to support English learning is on everyone's minds, and my institution in particular has begun a major initiative (CELLTR) to in part reconceptualize EAL and multlingualism at the university and create new initiatives, programs, etc. to support English learning and learners and teachers across the university.
FAL then, because of its context, has shades of both "basic writing" and "ESL" without being either; it was born as a result of an American-style WAC initiative, but is also run in many ways like a British-style EAP course (i.e. a course that gets interational students ready for English-medium university work). However, there is such a "Vancouvery" mix of students -- L1, L2, international, local, so-called 'gen 1.5,' students who went to Canadian or other international schools abroad, etc etc etc -- that it's hard to imagine any one-size-fits-all approach being appropriate for the course. The multicultural and transnational character of the student body to me suggests to me the need to look to British models that encourage all students regardless of background to become ethnographers of the language and culture of the university, and explicitly to work together in 'mixed' groups as they do this. Some of this happens naturally in FAL, but it could happen more*.
This is a larger issue that goes beyond FAL and probably extends at least to CELLTR. While FAL wasn't part of this initiative, which only began a few years ago, both can be seen as the result of an institution waking up to who its students are and the kind of university it wants to be.
[* Another very important issue I don't know enough about yet is what institutional pressures make FAL what it is, which is a rather rigid, high-stakes test-oriented course at the moment, though this wasn't always the case. I'm going to be looking into the history of FAL over the course of the next year to try to learn about where it's been, how it got to where it is, and where it's going.]
I teach in a course called Foundations of Academic Literacy. It's the type of course that would easily be considered "Basic Writing" in the US, but it's very divorced from the origins of "Basic Writing" as I understand them.
(It's very likely that many writing courses that are at a 'foundational' or 'basic' or 'remedial' or 'preparatory' level also don't come from the same historical stream that traditional basic writing courses did, which was the open enrollments of the 1960s and 70s, and universities scrambling to 'deal with' students of the type they hadn't enrolled many of before, i.e. students from non-elite backgrounds. This is an oversimplification but if we look at CUNY in the 1970s and the way Mina Shaughnessy conceptualized the idea of BW, this is it in a nutshell.)
So, here's where FAL differs from BW:
1. There is no such thing as "first-year composition" -- in the sense of a required beginning college writing course for all students -- at my institution, nor is this a very common practice in almost all Canadian institutions. There are several reasons for this that are interesting but that I don't have time to get into (they have to do with, as usual, politics and ideologies in English departments). BW in the US is often understood as a "pre-FYC" course, but we have no FYC.
That being said -- and maybe this is point (1a), FAL was created as a kind of "pre-W" course; in other words, it was created to serve the needs of students who are deemed (though we can talk more about why they are so deemed) to not be "ready" for W-courses. The W-initiative, that is, a pretty straightforward implementation of disciplinary, writing-across-the-curriculum-inspired, genre-aware, writing-to-learn-enhanced courses, was implemented around ten years ago pretty successfully by a series of units staffed by rhet/comp specialists that have since completely disappeared from the university (the specialists and the units). So FAL does have a status as being "pre" - something, but the thing it is "pre" is multifarious.
Despite this difference -- which may or may not be a big one, practically -- the perceived need for FAL probably comes from the same place the perceived need for BW does: some students "aren't ready" for university writing for some reason, and they need to be.
2. Related: a quick-and-dirty understanding of why the students "aren't ready" relates back to the unique context from which FAL emerges as distinct from BW. While BW was considered a reaction to the influx of urban, working-class, ethnic minority (etc) American students in the 70s, FAL can be said to be a "reaction" to the unique cultural context of 21st century British Columbia, which includes both a recent influx of immigration (which certainly has been steady for many years, but seems to have picked up in the last 20 years especially) and a huge increase in international students at both the K-12 and university level, a trend that is very likely to continue for a variety of reasons. This maybe isn't that different from CUNY in the 70s, but the unique national and local contexts of Canada, BC, and the Vancouver area make the "issues" different.
One of the "issues" -- and maybe this is point (2a), is an much bigger emphasis on ESL (or EAL as it's usually called at my institution) in the local educational culture. Perhaps because of the waves of immigration we see here, the question of how to support English learning is on everyone's minds, and my institution in particular has begun a major initiative (CELLTR) to in part reconceptualize EAL and multlingualism at the university and create new initiatives, programs, etc. to support English learning and learners and teachers across the university.
FAL then, because of its context, has shades of both "basic writing" and "ESL" without being either; it was born as a result of an American-style WAC initiative, but is also run in many ways like a British-style EAP course (i.e. a course that gets interational students ready for English-medium university work). However, there is such a "Vancouvery" mix of students -- L1, L2, international, local, so-called 'gen 1.5,' students who went to Canadian or other international schools abroad, etc etc etc -- that it's hard to imagine any one-size-fits-all approach being appropriate for the course. The multicultural and transnational character of the student body to me suggests to me the need to look to British models that encourage all students regardless of background to become ethnographers of the language and culture of the university, and explicitly to work together in 'mixed' groups as they do this. Some of this happens naturally in FAL, but it could happen more*.
This is a larger issue that goes beyond FAL and probably extends at least to CELLTR. While FAL wasn't part of this initiative, which only began a few years ago, both can be seen as the result of an institution waking up to who its students are and the kind of university it wants to be.
[* Another very important issue I don't know enough about yet is what institutional pressures make FAL what it is, which is a rather rigid, high-stakes test-oriented course at the moment, though this wasn't always the case. I'm going to be looking into the history of FAL over the course of the next year to try to learn about where it's been, how it got to where it is, and where it's going.]
What is Writing?
"What is writing? Why does one write? For whom? The fact is, it seems that nobody has ever asked himself these questions." - J.P Sartre
What is writing?
Could you answer that question, if you had to?
Could you come up with a program of research that could answer it?
Could you assemble a panel discussion of people wide-ranging enough to represent every discipline and approach that would attempt an answer?
Could you come up with a definition that a linguist, a poet, a teacher, a rhetorician, a novelist, a literary critic, a critical theorist, a philosopher, an editor, a journalist, an anthropologist, a computer programmer, a comic book author, a calligrapher, a college student using Yik Yak, a Bible translator, a blind person, a graffiti artist, a three year-old child learning to form the letters of his name, and an MFA professor would agree on?
Would it even be worth it to try?
Why not?
"In short, the study of writing is a major subset of the history of human consciousness, institutions, practice, and development over the last five millenia, and composition--the learning and teaching of writing--is in the middle of all that." - Charles Bazerman
On Being a Lapsed MLA Member
I became a member of the Modern Language Association in 2014, mostly because I was on the job market, grad student memberships were cheap, the convention was in the city where I live, and I wanted free access to Interfolio. (I was already using the JIL as a non-member.)
Becoming an MLA member was sort of a deferred dream come true. There was a time in my life, probably around age 17-22, that I assumed, hoped, or wished that I would one day be an English professor. I have always loved to read, and even as my academic career took me further and further from literature (the last time I really engaged with the academic study of literature was reading almost all of Middlemarch for an aesthetics class at Humboldt State in 2006), and from English departments, I have often said that I see myself as an "English department person." My main interest in life (apart from first-order things like family) is books, and reading and writing.
But frankly, whenever I get a small glimpse of what goes on in of the humanities today (as opposed to education, applied linguistics, and TESOL, which are fields I actually work in), I feel like getting out of "English" was the right thing for me to do. I like where I am compared to where I might be if I had seriously considered literature as a career.
Yet I can't stop thinking about wanting to engage with the MLA, even though I have decided to let my membership lapse. It's not just that I still want to believe somehow that I have a future as a tweedy, bookish professor (rather than the sometimes obnoxiously practical non-tenure-track writing teacher I am); it's that the MLA represents a lot of stuff that I really do think is important.
When I think about jumping in to the conversation, though, I have to step back. (And not only because you have to submit things like 40 years in advance to get published in the PMLA.) I don't work in an English department. I don't even work in the humanities at all; much as I feel sad saying this, I'm just not trained to think like a humanist. (I might have a humanist's heart, but I have a language educator's brain.) And I don't work in the United States. (The MLA, like most American professional associations, is pretty US-centric, which is perhaps understable, though I did have to wonder at the sheer absurdity that the people who ran the conference put up signs referring to "ADA Elevators" -- that's elevators per the "Americans with Disabilities Act"-- when we were literally in Canada.)
So I don't think the MLA is for me, for a number of reasons, but I'm glad it does what it does, and I mourn my lapsed membership, in a small way, the way you might mourn leaving a country, or a community, or a religion: I don't speak the language any more (if I ever did), but I know I'm missing something by not making the effort.
10 things to think about if you are starting a PhD
1. I know that the constant barrage of thinkpieces about Why You Shouldn't Do a PhD is annoying, but do take some time to think about your motivation. To be honest mine was sometimes questionable; part of it was the fantasy of my own office and having "Dr." in front of my name. (And those things are both pretty awesome, yes.) Try to admit to yourself what it is you want out of this.
2. Related: be very suspicious of the notion that educational debt is "good debt." When it comes to loans, I made some terrible financial choices during my graduate studies, and some necessary compromises in the 6th year of my PhD that I will have to deal with for years to come. Budget and work so that you are not paying more tuition than you have to.
3. So: start planning now -- NOW -- for fifth- and sixth-year funding. Assuming you came in with a four year scholarship (and if you came in with no funding you should really be thinking hard about whether it's worth it), you need to be very aware of your options when that dries up. If you're in Canada, write a kick-ass SSHRC your third year, if you're eligible. If not, look to your home country, private foundations, other institutions -- really work hard to see what is available.
4. You should at least consider quitting at some point. Dark nights of the soul are common and even to be welcomed -- it means you're taking it seriously!
5. Learn to live with regrets. Choosing a PhD closes a number of doors, even as it opens others.
6. Don't let your supervisor or anyone else strongarm you into doing research on their topic. I know this is different in the sciences, but I am very grateful that I had a supervisor who let me develop a topic and an approach that was completely my own.
7. Your goal should be to stop thinking of yourself as a student. This will happen on its own, eventually (though I have a friend who said she didn't stop feeling like a student until she'd been a tenure-track professor for six years), but keep it in mind. Remember that grad school is part of your career, not preparation for it.
8. Don't stop reading and thinking outside your discipline if you don't want to. Resist the pull of hyperspecialization and keep your mind flexible.
9. Go out. Don't sit all day. Run, walk, hike, go out for beers, go to concerts, have lunch with friends. Do these as often as possible, especially when you're writing your dissertation. It will prevent you from feeling paranoid and isolated.
10. Pray without ceasing.
Meaning making is not semiotic
Not everything is semiotic. The making of "meaning" is actually what Wertsch argues that it is; all human meaning-making is in fact "mediated action."
However, it is a mistake to argue that language is the only mediated action that makes meaning. It is even a mistake to argue that other semantic/semiotic processes are the only mediated action that make meaning. (E.g. visual, spatial, audio, etc.)
In fact, physical and emotional interaction with people, entities, and things are also mediated action and hence, meaning-making activities. It is a mistake to think that meaning-making is always a conscious process.That is, there are meaning-making processes that cannot be interpreted via other channels.
The making of meaning is the making of a life, a home, a family; it is the intangibility of the space between people.
However, it is a mistake to argue that language is the only mediated action that makes meaning. It is even a mistake to argue that other semantic/semiotic processes are the only mediated action that make meaning. (E.g. visual, spatial, audio, etc.)
In fact, physical and emotional interaction with people, entities, and things are also mediated action and hence, meaning-making activities. It is a mistake to think that meaning-making is always a conscious process.That is, there are meaning-making processes that cannot be interpreted via other channels.
The making of meaning is the making of a life, a home, a family; it is the intangibility of the space between people.