No, the title of my post isn’t a admonition against the seafood options at UM dining halls. Rather, it’s a reference to an oft-quoted proverb “If you give a man a fish, he will have a single meal. If you teach him how to fish, he will eat all his life.” The same idea clearly emerges in all four articles up for discussion on Monday. As instructors, we want our students to succeed in our courses and transfer effective thinking and writing skills beyond our classroom. And to do so, we must be prepared to give them their fishing rod, hooks, and bait—or, in other words, to show them valuable strategies for workshop, revision, brainstorming, and invention.
Betty Bamberg clearly explores and evaluates many revision strategies in her chapter on the subject; she also differentiates between higher-order concerns (which “reconceptualize revision as a primary means of developing, elaborating, and shaping the intended meaning of a text,” p. 108) and lower-order concerns (which characterize revision as “a mechanical process involving little more than correcting errors or making minor changes in sentence structure or word choice,” p. 108). As Bamberg’s survey of the literature shows, most college students perceive and implement revision in terms of the lower-order concerns—which we as composition instructors know can be frustrating, since making these surface-level changes doesn’t really strengthen our students’ writing abilities in the long term (nor, really, their assignments in the short term). It’s understandable that our students would perceive revision this way, especially given that the first composition course established at Harvard (and later imitated and implemented at many other institutions) was created as a remedial course, designed to rectify students’ issues with conventions, not content (109).
As instructors, it’s our job to help students rethink their definition of revision to reflect the rhetorical focus that emerged 60s—to help them see revision not as the addition of commas or elimination of contractions made to satisfy the instructor’s red marks, but as a “re-seeing” of their draft’s ideas, its content (110). To do so, we must create lesson plans that make our students engage in critical thinking; emphasize the importance of higher-order concerns over lower ones, both in our evaluative criteria and in our in-class workshops; model successful peer review sessions; and monitor the verbal and written feedback we give to our students, making sure they reflect concern not just for conventions, but for textual meaning and how it’s conveyed to the reader. Of course, whether they choose to implement the higher-order revision strategies we model in-class or in our marginalia is ultimately up to them, but I know I sleep better knowing I’ve prepared my class for the rhetorical challenges that await.
In addition to embedding paradigms for revision in our pedagogy, we must also provide examples of effective invention strategies for our Writ 101ers. It’s important to note that students might not always be aware of what invention constitutes, and where or when they can employ it. As Lesner and Craig assert, oftentimes “readers and writers may be misled to understand invention as something that takes place in one definite moment that can’t be revisited while in the middle of writing” (127). This misconception—likely bolstered by the fact that invention exercises are usually positioned in the beginning of units and then abandoned as work goes on—diminishes the recursive nature of composition. And this can be detrimental to students’ writing; once they feel “locked in” to a topic they’re unlikely to modify it, which can lead to unfocused or oversimplified drafts. It’s important to help our students understand that, as Trim and Isaac state, “writers can brainstorm ideas, hone in on a topic, and refine that topic continually, no matter how much drafting, researching, or revising has already occurred” (108). Invention can and should intervene at any point in the writing process. Trim and Isaac also point to a phenomenon that we might soon encounter as our students select Op-Ed topics: the difficulty many of them face when asked to come up with their own subject. I’m allowing my students to loosely interpret sustainability and move their topics beyond just environmental ones; I thought that giving them room for creativity would be more fun for them. However, as Trim and Isaac assert, in high school students are often given a list of topics to choose from—being unmoored without a list and told to invent their own focus can be downright terrifying (109).
So how can we help our students embrace their creativity and recognize invention’s potential uses throughout their writing processes? I think we must embed invention in our curriculum, not only as a starting point but as a “pit stop” for students to return to at many points along the unit. Including invention in the middle of a unit plan would give students the freedom to reevaluate and, if necessary, adjust their topic, claim, focus, or whatever higher-order element that needs reconsideration. Craig and Lessner model many invention strategies that could be tailored to our classrooms and placed throughout the unit plans, from rhetorical reading exercises (130) to visual and auditory outlining (137-8 and 140). Trim and Isaac detail strategies for brainstorming topics individually and as a group, as well as a rhetorical awareness activity that calls for students to “invent a genre” (119-121) and a small group exercise designed to refine students’ research topics—a good invention strategy to use at a “post-research point” (121-2). Antlitz too offers multiple (and extremely creative) invention strategies, ranging from role-playing as famous authors, costumes and all (96-7) to posting ideas as status updates on Facebook to see what feedback they generate (102-3). Though Antlitz’ strategies may be a bit too eccentric to implement in my own classroom, the motive behind them—to get our students “to see the subject of [their] writing through [their] own vision of it”—rings true (92). As with revision, the intent behind teaching invention strategies is that our students could take the same exercises and apply them to writing done outside of our course—making them creative and self-sufficient writers.
So next time you go to teach, ask yourself “Have I taught them to fish?” If the answer is yes, give yourself a pat on the back and watch excitedly as they cast their lines, knowing that though it’s their choice whether they follow your instruction or not, you’ve provided all you could for them to succeed. And if your students don’t know how to fish, step back and ask yourself what you can model to help them understand and implement critical writing strategies like invention and revision.
Brittany,
ReplyDeleteI think that your fish analogy provides a useful way to consider the difference between lower- and higher- order concerns (and is cute, to boot). Correcting a grammar mistake or one clunky sentence is indeed like giving one’s student a fish— the lower-order correction provides a one-time fix without clearly providing avenues and tools for future revision practices. As you note, “these surface-level changes don’t really strengthen our students’ writing abilities in the long term.” This is precisely because the grammar mistake or clunky sentence correction is likely to be perceived by the writer as an isolated case. Furthermore, the writer might be inclined to consider revision unimportant since such lower-order revisions will be made by the red pen happy teacher once the work is submitted. In other words, why bother revising if all it involves is proofreading, which someone else is going to do anyway?
I also agree that encouraging our students to revise their writing based on higher-order concerns simultaneously encourages them to engage in critical thinking. By focusing on higher-order issues of rhetoric and argumentation, the writer is inherently encouraged to make connections with ideas outside the limited scope of the paper— genre situation, audience, etc. Concepts such as these serve to emphasize the broader scene of writing in which the writer is engaged.
I think the return to invention is important throughout the writing process. Some of the less-developed PAAs I evaluated could have benefited from additional invention. One of the tendencies of these weaker essays is that they fail to linger upon or unpack the connections between the academic evidence used and the claims the author makes. Using invention all along the way would help the author make those necessary connections and present them to the reader in a digestible way.
Freewrites definitely are a place to “embed” invention throughout a unit. One of the benefits of off-the-cuff writing is that the writer is encouraged to make spontaneous mental connections that in turn allow for further discovery. The Op-Ed is also well suited to the idea of visual outlining, the feedback from which might help a student shape his or her argument on a higher level (see Ballenger 247 for an example of visual outlining).
Brittany,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on the importance of invention as a “pit stop” in the writing process. When I read Lessner and Craig’s assertion that “invention activity best helps you not only to begin specific papers most effectively, but also to generate new ideas and arguments during the writing process” (Lessner and Craig, 127) I realized that I hadn’t embedded invention throughout the PAA unit one bit. In fact, upon further reflection I realized that it’s not included in my Op-Ed unit either. While it may be challenging to convince students of the worth of invention in the middle of an assignment that they’ve already begun (“Huh? You want me to reconsider my argument? Make changes? But I already have 1000 words!”), Lessner and Craig make several valid points for its effectiveness in a successful writing process that we as teachers should heed (and implement in our own writing as well).
The Trim and Isaac article addresses this challenge and suggests that one of the strengths of invention is its ability to engage students in their writing on a personal level. The authors write (to students), “we seek to pull you out of school mode and into everyday life mode where you can bring one of your interests from life outside of school into the classroom via your writing assignments” (115). This ties in well with previous theories we’ve discussed in WRIT 540, particularly the Matalene article that urges teachers to encourage students to use experience as evidence, thus making writing “real” and honest. Invention, as Trim and Isaac suggest, is a great way to spark such writing, and not just at the beginning of the process.
I will third the sentiment that invention practices were not embedded nearly enough in my students’ writing of the personal academic argument. I used topic “statements of purpose” and, of course, the project narrative as opportunities for my students to think critically about why their topic was an appropriate and promising one, but in reading some of these essays, I’m realizing that much of the trouble lies in the fact that my students did not do enough invention work to choose a topic in the first place. Or, rather, we failed to move from casual to critical invention work, as suggested by Lessner and Craig—something I will be sure to employ in the coming week as my students explore op-ed topics.
ReplyDeleteI confess that prior to reading these articles, I wrote off invention as being a casual exercise for the very beginning of the writing process; I had a hard time seeing the value of freewrites, diagrams and bullets in the formulation of a strong topic mainly because I have never used those things myself. Even as a freshman writer, I preferred to let my ideas “stew” mentally, and I did much narrowing down of my topic by researching for hours. But in retrospect, though I did quite well on my papers (disregarding the first, which earned a C), the process was quite agonizing. The concept of moving from loose to focused to critical freewrites would have been very helpful to me; in fact, it’s something I recently started to do with creative writing in order to combat that feeling of drowning in a huge idea. With the start of this new unit, I would like to make peace with invention strategies and formally introduce them to my students with in- and out-of-class exercises. I’m hoping they’ll find that perfect tool that will make the refining of their ideas more efficient, more successful and less agonizing—that tool that I really could have used six years ago. I’m confident that I’ve been teaching my students to fish all semester—but I’d really like to see them getting fish they actually want to keep.
I love the fishing metaphor. This is exactly how it feels sometimes in my class, especially when I hear students complain that they were not given the necessary tools to write effective papers starting from the invention process and ending with editing during high school. I feel that those past teachers let some of my students down because now, keeping with the metaphor, they either can’t fish or don’t think they can. I have several students who, just like Brittany pointed out, were horrified at not having a list of topics to choose from. This anxiety followed them all the way through the PAA essay and into the Reflective Essay. I had one student complain that she couldn’t write her reflection essay until she had received her PAA grade. I told her that I wanted to see how she felt about her process and not influence it with my comments. To which she replied “How am I supposed to know how I did without a grade?” I thought this was really interesting, rather than focus on and truly evaluate how she experienced her writing process she wanted to evaluate herself on how I saw her process/paper. I feel like there is a real disconnect here between personal/academic standards. Self assessment is crucial to understanding writing conventions and I am hoping that this student will start to see the value in it. Just like Antlitz points out in her essay she “learned that feelings and ideas are very closely related during invention, and so it’s a good idea to pay attention to them.” (Antlitz 90) I would argue that these personal feelings are important to the process as a whole and not just the invention stage.
ReplyDeleteI love this analogy - as every poster seems to echo.
ReplyDeleteI think starting these students off with a combination of a using an awkward personal pronoun in an academic paper, certainly parallel being handed a fishing pole and saying, "good luck". What better way is there to welcome students to college writing?
Personally, I think it's good for them. It's great practice to begin to understand the work it takes to survive college writing. No one is going to make a delicious warm sea-food dinner, you've got to get out there and get going. Alone. Of course, the space we give our students in allowing them to develop a research question and to understand their own research process, is giving them the basic tools to survive similar assignments in future classes.
The same can be said for the invention process. The time and space we give them to individually garner a connection and context to the writing process and differing assignments, the better off they are. If we held their hand and coddled them, they wouldn't be prepared for the rest of their college writing lives.
I'm glad we are reading these revision strategies right now. With this Op-ed Unit, I've been asking myself: "How do I teach Op-ed in a recursive way that will help students make connections back to their PAAs" So many classes I have been a part of we have just "moved-on" and never revisited the invention part of the revision process.
ReplyDeleteIt's exciting to learn these teaching methods. Developing a critical stance in a academic conversation that is already taking place is a huge part of becoming engaged.
Lessner's Text Messaging exercise could be adapted for a lot of
"everyday" genres that students already know.
Brittany,
ReplyDeleteI also love your fish metaphor! Where would any of us be if someone hadn’t taught us to fish?
Like Noel, I initially didn’t know how I was going to “sell” my students on invention. I had never “invented” as a college student—but, damn, I wish I had! As Trim and Isaac point out to their undergraduate audience, “you will find that energy invested in the invisible stages of writing pays dividends later on” (110).
But how do you make that point to students who have not yet seen the dividends paying later on? I also felt a little guilty to realize I hadn’t included invention mid-stream in the PAA unit. As I read my students’ reflective essays, however, I think that maybe I did. Maybe we all did. In the PAA unit, did you ever ask them to write about something new they learned that would affect the scope of their topic? Something they might have to adjust about their question, now that they’d done some research? Reading my students’ reflective essays, I was surprised and excited to see how many of them chose to write about their change in attitudes about invention. Several of them cited those mid-unit fastwrites as examples of times when they realized they’d have to make a change to their topic and abandon what they hoped would be an efficient linear writing process. But those are the students who also seem to express the most value for invention now. One of them wrote, regarding a mid-unit informal writing conference that influenced him to change his topic, “By donating just 30 minutes of my time, I saved myself hours of staring at the computer screen with writers [sic] block.”
I think that the lesson of invention will stick once they experience the value of it. With that in mind, we’ll teach them to fish by forcing them to fish—at least at first—as long as we also provide opportunities for them to reflect upon just how valuable that process can be.
Brittany,
ReplyDeleteI too, "...loosely interpret sustainability and move their topics beyond just environmental ones." I, too, "...thought that giving them room for creativity would be more fun for them." Through this belief, I unintentionally increased student interest.
After obtaining interest, I worked to increase engagement through through the invention process (which, prior to 540, I did not understand). Several of you have given me great ideas, some of which have worked well, and the readings this week provided some useful exercises, too.
I especially liked the Lessner/Craig idea about freewriting and focusing (131). Antlitz' ideas on journaling were helpful because several of my students have mentioned their journals as a way to invent, to process.
Your fish analogy obviously struck a chord with everyone. The analogy has practical application to many areas of my class, especially to grading, an area where I tend to perform like a fishing guide. I catch the fish for them, instead of teaching them how to catch their own.
Helpful analogy, Brittany.