production junction

it's been a pretty productive day but one that could have been far more happy had i had time to play around with the new camera. still, i'm a paragraph away from (finally) having a full draft of my third-year assessment and (what's even better) the floors have been mopped. i hate the idea of starting the semester with a dirty or cluttered living space.

i've been thinking a lot about a post i did awhile ago that dealt with the study and use of models. more specifically still, i've been thinking about models as they relate to task parameters. when faced with what the prospect of composing a type of text that i am not familiar with--that i don't have a lot of experience reading or writing (like third-year review self-assessments produced by people at this particular institution) or that i consider to be particularly high-stakes (i.e., no assessment, no job)--i tend to go model-hungry-nuts. i mean, i want to see what others have done, i want to see models (successful or not). . .bottom line, i want to know how to be an A student where As (at least in this context) translate into increased chances for contract renewal. What I look to the models for are not, of course, right answers but parameters: trends, tendencies, indications of what must be there, what's non-negotiable and where there might be room for play, tailoring and variation.

since this (by "this" i mean parameters) is what my tasks mainly provide students with, i often wonder what, exactly, students really want, mean, or hope to get from me when they ask me to share with them models, samples, or examples of the ways former students have taken up a particular task. when i show them, say, a scrapbook and/or a videogame that someone has produced in response to a particular task, does this automatically translate into something like, "oh, she wants a scrapbook OR a webpage--those kinds of text are okay/safe." given that many students with whom i've worked have worked in academic contexts where final products tend to all look more or less the same (i.e., are roughly of the same "type"--memos, webpages, essays), i can certainly understand (and have learned to anticipate) the "this-kind-of-text-is-safe-to-compose" response. to this end, i try to head things off by saying something like, "okay--i'll share with you the various ways others have approached this task, now your job is to think of still other ways to satisfy the non-negotiable aspects of the task." and these, dare i say, rarely have to do with determining for students what their final products should look like--what those texts must specifically be or do.

to be sure, with the the self-assessment, there are certain things i know i must absolutely achieve, especially when it comes to the physical appearance or visual design of my final product, and i know this mainly because i was the first one in the workshop to ask about formating, asking single or double spaced, what size font, are we to use section headers? etc. still, as i look at the few examples i have to hand, i am mainly tracking other people's rhetorical moves, trying to figure out, firstly, what i must accomplish in this document and then spending the bulk of my time trying to figure out how best to accomplish what i need and want to do with this particular piece of writing.