people might think i mean it

twenty/four

twenty/three

twenty/two

twenty/one

what goes best with chapters 1-2 of James Wertsch's Mind as Action?

(anyone game for another round of 20 questions?)

hippity hop (no thanks)

No Cs for me next week

product academe (front)

product academe (back)

gelatin makes me nervous

real soon, right?

question 21/take one

This question is not, technically speaking, included on the list of 20 questions included in Take 20, but my answer to this particular question gets, I think, to some of the questions on the list that I've not yet had time to think or work through.

This afternoon, I received an email from a former student. (With the student's permission, I reproduce the question portion of the email along with my reply.) The student writes:

"I wanted to ask you (if you don't mind), what are your reservations about the IRE sequence in the classroom? I am beginning a paper on the topic (observing whether it breeds optimal opportunity for learning richness to occur or not to occur) and I have gathered that you somewhat avoid this sequence in your own teaching pedagogy. Why? You've always presented kind of a decentralized classroom where students take the floor as equally as the teacher (and on some days students take the floor almost completely, as this is what happened on group presentation days) and also, you sometimes juggled the role as playing both teacher and student simultaneously. This is how I have gathered that you generally veer away from the IRE sequence. I guess I'm requesting for some sort of insight you may have about this particular methodology of teaching (of course, if you don't mind sharing your thoughts about it). From reading about it briefly in an article as well as from my own prior experience, I extract that this methodology of teaching promotes individualism and not a sense of community between peers. This brought me to thinking about the happening movement, which idealistically, works to create a sense of community, right? Maybe, I should read more about it. Does this all make sense?"

And I replied:

I’ve not really thought of myself as someone who avoids or particularly dislikes the IRE sequencing though I do think the way this question-posing, turn-taking model is often portrayed in scholarship and/or the way it is taken up in actual practice has gotten (deservedly or not) a bad rap. If anything, much of what I do (I think) can’t help but follow along these “teacher initiates, student replies/responds, teacher evaluates” turn-taking lines: I, as teacher, initiate “X,” students (often having no other choice in the matter, save for avoiding me, and dropping the course) reply/respond in some way, and then I evaluate their responses and decide what to do (or not do) next time. You mention the group presentations, for instance. Long before a group actually presents, I have initiated the assigned readings, the groups, the requirement to meet with me at least one week in advance of the presentation date, and so on. During the pre-presentation meeting I initiate still other things, normally by way of a series of (seemingly never-ended) questions geared, in part, toward helping me better understand what, specifically so, will be happening during the presentation session, how the activities or discussion connects to the assigned readings and so on: “So what are you all thinking about and/or planning on doing? Why that (and not another idea you have come up with)? How will you do that? How much of the class period will it take to do that? What will you do as a back-up plan? How will you construct activities prompts to avoid unnecessary confusion?” Based on what I hear/see, I may make an evaluative statement (i.e., can’t do that, won’t work, I’m not comfortable with that, I don’t see how that connects, sound good, cool beans) or I might ask still other questions. Do these serve an evaluative function? I think so. The questions might be geared toward pushing people to think of other still other consequences of their goals and choices (i.e., a way of saying, “I’m not sure you’ve thought through all the angles”) or they might function of a way of saying, “I’m not sure I completely understand, can you say more or put it another way?” As you well know, once the presentation has been completed, another IRE round begins with me asking group members to revisit their goals in choices in light of what happened during and after the presentation and this is a document that I, in turn, definitely evaluate.

All that said, the distinction I think you may be drawing here could have less to do with the IRE sequence itself than with kinds of questions it’s often associated with. I think now of the distinctions Nystrand makes between “authentic questions,” “quasi-authentic questions,” and “test questions.” Nystrand (as quoted in Wertsch) writes:

“Authentic questions are questions for which the asker has not prescribed an answer. . .Dialogically, authentic teacher questions signal to students the teacher’s interest in what they think and know and not just whether they can report what someone else think or has said. Authentic questions invite students to contribute something new to the discussion that can change or modify it in some way. By contrast, a test question allows students no control over the flow of the discussion. Because authentic questions allow an indeterminate number of acceptable answers and open the floor to students’ ideas, they work dialogically. . .a test question allows only one possible right answer, and is hence monologic (in Lotman’s terms, univocal).”

While it is true that I rarely ask questions that follow along the lines of the state/capital example referenced in this same text (i.e., I don’t typically start class by asking, “Okay folks, who can tell me who wrote Mind as Action?” Student 1: “Kress?” Teacher: “Nope, anyone else have a guess? Student 2: Wertsch?” Teacher: “Good.”), I know you know I do ask, have asked, more than my fair share of “test questions,” questions for which I certainly have a definite, non-negotiable “right answer” in mind: “Will everyone take out their readings?” “Who doesn’t have the readings?” “Why don’t you have the readings?”

So I think the difference you might be picking up on here has less to do with the IRE sequence itself and more to do with the kinds of questions I often ask or the work I see questions potentially doing in my classroom. As the word “authentic” tends to make me giggle (unless Oprah comes to mind first which just sets me off on a rant), I’d prefer the word “earnest” or “interested.” I mean, I am pretty interested in how people are or are not making sense of, complicating, extending, connecting to still other contexts the assigned readings, discussions, tasks and activities. Problem is (as you well know), it’s often the case that when I throw out the first question, regardless of how open-ended I try to make it (i.e., “So what’s the dealio with Wertsch and his properties of mediational means?” "What's the dealio with pogo sticks? Why don't people use them anymore?"), people tend to respond always and only to or through me—perhaps because it was my question/concern/book pick/hobby/whatever in the first place.

For this reason, the sessions I tend to enjoy the most and in which I often learn the most about still other potentials for making and negotiating meaning (i.e., from perspectives other than my own) are the group presentation and the workshopping sessions. Any session, really, when it seems more like we’re almost approximating a “real” discussion/conversation (by “real” I mean when we have dispensed with the hand-raising, when people seem invested in the topic, when they are looking at, talking to—sometimes even interrupting each other—this, as opposed to having any/all comments and questions directed at or funneled through me). I’m not saying that this can’t happen with during the teacher-lead discussion sessions, but with the workshopping sessions, especially, it seems like students come to the class with questions they want/need to have answered, questions about what they are trying to accomplish as opposed, I suppose, to questions about what Wertsch or the inventor of the pogo stick was trying to accomplish. What’s important to underscore though about the group presentation and workshopping sessions (at least as I understand them) is that, save perhaps for online sessions or f2f session where there’s a lot of interruption and cross-talking, they are still patterned on the IRE model. But in these cases, it’s often case that the student (as opposed to the teacher) initiates the questions, the teacher (and/or other students) reply/respond, and then the student evaluates what his/her classmates and teacher have offered.

(PS. Having replied to your question, I await my evaluation. Otherwise put: Was this the right answer? Was this what you were looking for? Is this "A" work, or will I need to revise and resubmit?)

question twelve/take one

How do you orchestrate peers groups?

In one respect, I don’t orchestrate peer groups. Insofar as I tend to think about a peer group as the members of a particular class at a particular point in time, the students, the course offerings, course schedule, registration times, major-minor requirements, etc. orchestrate those things for me each semester. What’s been interesting (mainly because it’s been different in terms of my experience working with course-based peer groups) is that in this new context (my post U of I life), there is much more cross-over in terms of course-based peer groups. That is to say, at U of I, it would never be the case, since I always and only elected to teach fyc, that a student would take two of my courses. In this way, members of the course were unlikely to know each other before class started, unless, of course, they had gone to high school together and decided to sign up for the same section of fyc—but this tended not to happen. Since I teach a greater number of classes here, it’s been the case that course-based peer groups might consist of people who I haven’t met or worked with before as well as those with whom I have. In this way, some students come in knowing each other, knowing how my courses are taught, paced, what the expectation are, etc. while, for others, certain aspects of the peer group are new to/for them.

I do, however, orchestrate groups for the in-class presentation sessions. This, in contrast to having students decide who they want to work and then present with. Since group presentation dates are usually handed out early in the semester (long before I have a sense of class or peer group dynamics), it was the case, at least at U of I, that I attended mainly to gender issues. That is, if there were four people in a group, I tried to make sure that the group was comprised of two men and two women. (Ironically, and with the exception of the fall, 2001 semester—when I learned that 20 men and 2 women were enrolled in the course—this was more than doable as it tended to be the case that the male/female ratio of each course was pretty consistently half and half.) In this new context, I tend to be less concerned with having gender-balanced group, focusing more on balancing between people who haven’t had a class with me and each other with those who have.

When it comes to in-class workshops, these are run as large-group discussions or as problem-solving or strategy trouble-shooting sessions. Two 75 minute sessions are typically devoted to workshopping a task. While not altogether wild about the “help/helped” portion of the name that has been adopted for these sessions, they tend to be orchestrated along the lines of whether or not a student feels he or she has been “sufficiently helped” by feedback from his/her peers. Sounds corny now, but if I recall correctly, this name (i.e., “have you been sufficiently helped?”) was first adopted during a semester when, tired of sitting in the usual circle-formation, we tried to a workshop that was run talk-style show (think David Letterman or Jay Leno not Springer or Jenny Jones). One member of the class volunteered to be the host (or people would take turns being host), and he/she would sit at the big desk in front and call up one or two “guests” from the audience to talk about their work—what they were hoping do to, how, why, etc. The guest would then briefly describe what he/she was working on, or trying to do. Following this, he/she would ask questions and solicit feedback from the host and audience about his or her work: “At this point, I’m thinking about doing x, y and z but I can’t find a way to make this work because I don’t have access to b, c, and d, so I’m looking for alternatives to achieve this effect.” Or, “At this point I’m trying to do x, y and z in this particular way but I don’t think these aspects are really working—does this seem feasible? If not, any ideas about what else I might do?” After feedback was solicited (and it was sometimes the case that the feedback one got led the guest on to pretty significant changes in their plans of action), and to indicate a change in turn, so to speak, the host would ask if the guest had been sufficiently helped or the guest would say that he/she had been “sufficiently helped”. . .at least for now and the next participant would be called up front.

With larger classes (i.e., of twenty or twenty-five), not everyone has had (or has necessarily wanted) the chance to have the class focus—at least not in-class, face-to-face—on whatever he/she is working on. To this end, in-class workshops are followed up by asynchronous on-line workshopping sessions and students are always welcome to kick around ideas and strategies for approaching and/or finishing a task with me over email, during office hours or, in some cases, by phone. (That my ideas/strategies are often pretty weak proves helpful, I think, in terms of helping people better identify what, exactly, they do not want to do in response to a task.)

Despite the fact that not everyone may have (or take) the opportunity to receive feedback on their work during the in-class sessions, I have found them helpful in terms of providing students with a sense of how others are approaching tasks, solving problems, strategizing, taking on or up and then transforming contexts, tools, goals and so on. Since the tasks I provide students with might be approached in any number of ways, I think it proves helpful for students to describe or otherwise model for each other how they found their ways into a particular task. While putting students in in-class groups of 2, 3 or 4 would better allow/ensure that everyone in the group has a chance to talk about their work, solicit feedback, etc. it would also mean that students (and likely I) would only be privy to the way 2 or 3 other people are thinking about and/or approaching the task. So there’s a tradeoff here, to be sure. For my part, I enjoy (and have taken much that I can go on to share with future course-based peer groups) the large group discussion approach. Plus, it makes it both possible and far easier for me to step in and ask a question, make a suggestion or reroute things if it appears that people are thinking about approaching tasks in what may be decidedly unproductive ways.

question seven/take one

If you had to pick only one book for a writing teacher to read, what would it be?

While it doesn’t deal exclusively with writing issues/writing teachers and though it may be a little hard to get one’s hands on (i.e., next to impossible and pretty costly at this point to buy a used copy of the first edition), I’d recommend the 1971 (first) edition of Geranium. Words by Albert Cullum, art by Adams, Alcorn, Amsel, d’Andrea, Billout, Cober, Couratin, Fox, Lacroix, Ruffins, Seisser, Weisbecker and many others. Geranium is a must read for any teacher, a must read for students—in fact, if it weren’t out of print, I would put it on the required book list for most of the classes I teach. Geranium is a children’s book that Cullum dedicates to “all of those grownups who, as children, died in the arms of compulsory education.”

question five/take one

What is one thing that every writing teacher should know?

How to wait tables. My advice? Get a serving gig that allows you the potential of attending to (at minimum) nine tables at once during the busy shifts. Ask, as well, to be scheduled during the slower shifts where you’d have the potential, in case of a fluke off-hours rush, of tending to as many as 27 tables at once. If possible, get a job that requires that you, more often than not, also take on (while/between waiting tables) hosting, bartending and cashiering duties. This will, I am suggesting, at least to start, teach you more about (and give you more experience with) matters related to interpersonal communication, communicative alignment (or lack thereof), invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery, ethos, persona, voice, problem-solving, code-switching, multimodal communication, time management, production, consumption, reception/response, good pensmanship, various ways of reading/analyzing (i.e., people, situations, contexts, body language, gesture), revision, collaboration, etc. than about anything else I can think of.

twenty

nineteen

eighteen

question three/take one

What is the biggest surprise about teaching writing?

In a nutshell: That I have consistently enjoyed myself for the past ten years. Meaning that I’ve found the work both challenging and thought-provoking, that I always ending up learning about, seeing, having had the occasion to think about new potentials for making and negotiating meaning, etc. That I found this surprising has to do, of course, with my assumptions about and expectations for teaching writing courses to start: Back in 1997, I assumed (not really knowing what the fyc course at U of I was for or about, what kind of choices I might be able to make, etc.), that I would not like it or find it terribly interesting. Also, when I entered the program, I did so as a lit student eager to teach to my (then) strengths which were lit and writing about lit. The way the system was configured then, one would expect to teach fyc for a year or two and then, after one took the teaching lit prosem, he/she might choose to teach one lit course and one fyc course. Prior to having the opportunity to teach my first fiction course, I had really enjoyed teaching the fyc course in spite of the fact (or perhaps even because of the fact) that the course was required for some students but not for all which, in turn, meant that I would likely have a roomful of students who didn’t want to be there, who were angry or disappointed that they didn’t “test out” and so on. While others I had entered the program with might have been especially eager to finally be able to teach lit, I was like, “either way.” (Truth was, given how much I really enjoyed teaching fyc, I often wondered if I was doing it incorrectly.) Why, I wondered, was I not especially eager to get away from fyc and teach a course that was decidedly more in keeping with my (then) research interests and that students could take as an elective?

After taking and passing the second prosem, I built and then taught my first (and as it turned out to be my only) intro to fiction course, one that focused on different paradigms of and for desire, and one that students could elect to take to satisfy their comp II requirement. I loved the design of the course and the questions it allowed us to ask about what it means to love, what kinds of bodies qualify as loveable, and how concepts of love/desire are articulated and then complicated in or across different kinds of texts: Short stories, fairy tales, children’s books, teen fiction, and finally, a famous literary novel that we read alongside the Cliffs Notes for that novel. At one point in the semester the class was divided into four groups and each group read a different Harlequin romance. The idea here was to test the claim that these texts, the stories they are invested in telling, their characters, their narrative pacing are so much alike that they are essentially interchangeable. If this were true, we’d be able to have a coherent conversation about the texts despite the fact that we had read different books. My point here is that I loved the course design and it was a course that I would have taken if it had been offered. Students seemed to enjoy the class well enough, perhaps because of the focus/topic of the course, perhaps because they were reading kinds of texts they hadn’t expected to be asked to read (especially the Cliffs Notes—which many students ended up claiming had ruined the experience of reading Madame Bovary for them), perhaps because they had elected to take the course. Problem was, I often found the class, or my approach to the class, not boring per se, but limited. I certainly take the blame for this but it seemed like we did the same thing every day (i.e., we read a text before coming to class and then we talked about our readings of that text in class). It seemed the class was in a rut, but I couldn’t think of a way to open things up, to rethink the potentials of our day to day practice and to finally get us out of what I perceived as a rut. And that, to me, was frustrating and more than a little scary. I’m not sure if the “in a rut” feeling had to do with how I was teaching the course (i.e., the fact that this was my first time teaching this course and the material) or with the material itself but it was (and, again, I blame myself for this) a decidedly less active, “happening” place than my fyc courses tended to be despite the fact that I was bringing the same approach to writing/communicative practice to this new context. The point is that from that point on, when teaching preference forms came around I would request two sections of fyc, preparing myself to feign surprise and disappointment over not having received permission to teach another section of the intro to fiction course.

a sampling of composing spaces

JS: Okay. Let’s look at the overall process sketch. Some of the questions I have about that might be answered here.

MB: Okay. The perspective is weird. I was in the second row sitting right here. You’re lecturing, you’re talking about something, I don’t know what. I just thought it was really weird that, like, each person is alive and thinks various ideas, that whole thing. I just thought it was weird. Then you assigned the [history of “this” space] assignment so I thought it was weird that you’d assigned something like that. I got my idea early and then I couldn’t figure out how to put it together. . .


Then one day I was [MB laughs] sitting on the toilet, so that’s my bathroom, and figured out how to do my history. I thought it was kind of weird. I don’t know I thought this whole project was kind of weird.

JS: All right and in—okay what exactly is this? The floor?

MB: That’s bathroom tile, a towel, the door.



JS: Okay.

MB: And this was when I typing away at my computer. Um, I’d type up whatever the class had written out. After typing it, I’d kind of scramble it up.

JS: Okay, um, when you were working here, you were inputting the information, scrambling it and color-coding it at this location. How long did that take?

MB: A long time. I don’t know like it took a lot longer than I thought it would take cause if you do a good job scrambling then these things turn out a lot better. At the beginning they were really nice but the more and more I would do it, it was just too much work and it became really, really confusing.


So this one was the first time I went to Kinko’s and I used the backlight and started cutting [the paper decoder keys]. I did five of them. That was the whole day, I ate, slept, took a bath, came back the next day and did three more. I did pretty much of the whole project there. All around here, the little pieces I’m cutting out. [JS and MB laugh] That’s the knife I used. There was a big window in front of me, a really big window. Um, there were like stores and bars [across the street].

JS: You were on campus?


MB: Yeah. I’m this guy right here [MB points to center of the image]. This is my reflection in the window. You can kind of see the eyes right there, the mouth, My shoulders. This is, like, from my view. I could see myself in the window. This is 6th Street. The one that goes north-south.

JS: Um, who is this? [JS points to the figure right looking in]

MB: Some guy who stopped to look at me. [JS and MB laugh] All these people were going out to the bars. It was like two or one in the morning and it looked like they were having fun. I was pretty frustrated. I’d been there since like ten pm, just cutting up the keys. There weren’t many people in Kinkos cause this was a Sunday night.

JS: Did anybody in Kinko’s come by and ask you what you were doing? Were they paying attention to you?

MB: No, it was just like all these people were just walking by outside. There was like tons of people walking by and I felt really bad cause I was stuck here doing this. But that one guy stopped. I think he was drunk, I’m not sure. He looked kind of weird. I just kept noticing a lot people and got more frustrated.

JS: Okay. Did you do anything to cope with that frustration?

MB: No. I would stop and pause, look out the window and see what people were doing. But that just made me more frustrated cause I realized I was stuck here. And I had to finish it that night cause it was due the next day.

question nine/take one

Question nine: If you had to pick only one essay for a writing teacher to read, what would it be?

As the question doesn’t specify what the writing teacher may or may not already have read or experienced, where he/she is at in terms of his/her teaching career, who his/her specific audience is, what he/she hopes most or needs to accomplish, etc. my pick would be Jay Lemke’s “Social Semiotics: A New Model for Literacy Education.”

question eleven/take one

It may well be the case that I can address this question with one take:

Question eleven: Who influenced your work the most?

The matter of “who most influenced” is actually a matter of what-ness where the “what” is comprised, in part, of many, many historically- and geographically-distributed “whos.” Short answer on the “most influenced” question: The institutions I have worked at and the students with whom I have worked.

question one/take one

Like I'm guessing many others have recently done, I contacted my local book rep, eager to get my hands on a copy of Todd Taylor’s Take 20. In the meantime, I printed up and shared with a colleague as well as my 486/686 class the 20 questions Taylor asked interviewees to respond to, encouraging the people in 486/686 to think about how they might respond to these questions. In the spirit of playing along:

Question one: What do you remember about your first time teaching?

Take one: After receiving my letter of acceptance for the lit program at U of I and learning that I would be teaching Rhet 105 (a fyc course), I recall not being really sure what the course was, what it was about. My best guess was that it would involve (to whatever degree) tending to grammar and mechanics issues. In this way, I assumed that I would hate it. What’s more, I knew that if this was, in fact, what it was about that I couldn’t help but fail at it.

Flash forward to the end of the summer of ’97. While attending the intense week-long teaching orientation I get this idea in my head (one that I couldn’t seem to let go of no matter how many times the orientation advisors assured me that the students here were good students, eager students, students who would do pretty much whatever the teacher asked) that this will be Dangerous Minds. I saw myself walking into the class that first day, asking students if they have their books, asking them to do an in-class write or whatever and having them say, “#$%@@-you lady, we don’t gotta do #@#^& if we don’t wanna.” I don’t know that this was even a line in the movie. My point is that I worried a lot then about classroom management, authority and respect: How I’d do it (manage things), if I’d get it (respect), if I deserved it (authority), how I’d keep it, etc.

Flash forward to first day of that semester: I don’t recall many specific details after entering the classroom. That first day was (much as every first day thereafter has been) lost in an adrenaline blur: Not sure what I said, what I did. But I'm pretty sure I wore the black and white polka dot dress I once borrowed from Tammy and never ended up returning. I know for sure that I didn’t really see (meaning that I couldn’t get my eyes to focus on) anyone or anything save for whatever I was handing out that day—the course description, the syllabus. I do remember that it was decidedly not like Dangerous Minds though. The advisors had been right about that.

I remember this also about the first day (and about almost every first day since then): Having to take that longest walk. Getting myself to move out of my office (one at the time that I shared with many, many others) to whatever classroom I had been assigned. Thinking all the way there that I can’t do this won’t do this might die if I do this can’t do this what was I thinking? Thinking then of Laura Wingfield. Thinking that I would likely not be able to turn the knob and walk inside. Thinking that I could always go to the park instead. My mom wouldn’t know, at least not for a while, that I wasn’t where I said I’d be, or doing what I said I’d be doing. When she called to ask about the first day, I could make something up. I'd always had a pretty good imagination and my mom hadn’t, after all, even seen Dangerous Minds so I knew I'd have something to work with.

to choose

Violetta brought to my attention a wonderful graphic by the Italian educator Francesco Tonucci. The image that appears on her blog is featured left. A second image (right) features the English translation she provided in her entry.

jimmy d roll