Chris Anson's "Closed Systems and Standardized Writing Tests"

Chris Anson frequently begins his writing with scenarios. He asks us to imagine an overzealous father Sam who wants to impress his neighbors with his toddler Alyssa. He wants the neighbors to think of her as smart. He wants Alyssa to identify famous artists’ prints framed throughout the house. After much practice, Alyssa is able to tell which painting is a Renoir, Klee, Pollock, or Rembrandt. When the neighbors drop by, Alyssa points to a picture and most of the time names the artist.

Anson then explains that in educational terms, Sam has established learning outcomes for Alyssa, and based on its results, demonstrates significant success. Although Alyssa identifies some paintings, she really doesn’t know much about art, analysis, or interpretation—she can identify a few specific pieces from repeated exposure (112-114).

Anson compares this scenario to high-stakes national and state testing in which students are asked to respond to pre-determined outcomes based on routine structures. He challenges the assumption that knowledge based on routine writing skills and assignments can transfer to more diverse writing abilities, genres, and experiences (114).

Anson identifies two types of writing systems: an open system and a closed system. An open system becomes “constantly evolving, contextually mediated, and contextually determined practices, influenced by social and institutional histories, conventions, and expectations” (114). He explains that “proficiency in writing is not a matter of simply mapping a discrete set of learned skills onto new tasks in unfamiliar contexts; it requires the kind of rhetorical, discursive, and textual flexibility and sensitivity that we hope our programs and courses provide” (114-115).

A closed system, on the other hand, “is one in which the activities admit little variation, are habituated over long periods of time, and are learned through repeated practice” (115). By continued writing in closed systems, the “writer will inappropriately replicate the habituated form. . . and the lack of experience in those larger circles would doom them to adaptive failure” (115).

Anson explains that we teach writing in a closed system “when we reduce its rhetorical, linguistic, and performative complexity by created a fixed genre with artificially stable features and then teaching to it as a goal were to repeat the writing behavior ‘automatically’ without regard to different contexts and purposes” (115-116).

Anson admonishes that by having students write in an open system, such as preparing a monthly Internet newsletter, that students do work “across and between those [varied] contexts that gives them the experience of being in an open system, one that does not predict the way that future texts must be created in new and unfamiliar settings but provides the strategic knowledge to be discursively flexible to know how to ‘read’ a context in order to write in it” (116).

Anson establishes competence: “competence. . . describes writers who have developed the writing skills that enable them to perform capably in a variety of writing domains. They have a firm possession of the relatively general writing strategies that give them a great deal of flexibility, for instance strategies of discourse analysis, revision, generating ideas, getting started, overcoming writer’s block, determining and writing for audiences, etc. All of these are strategies that enable the writer to achieve some success in writing in a domain without extensive experience in that domain” (117).

As teachers, we need to allow our students to develop adaptive expertise: the ability to match new situations to previous experiences combined with the ability to abstract general problem-solving skills from previous experiences to apply in new situations” (118). “Good writing instruction, then assumes that it is important for learners to experience a range of writing tasks, contexts, and purposes, and that it is better for them to gain adaptive expertise than a narrowly defined set of skills relevant to a specific, artificial genre. . . Such instruction provides students with more time for sharing their writing and extending it into new domains, a wider range of curricular experiences, and a broader range of genres, and it ‘creates opportunities for students to be in different kinds of writing situations, where the relationships and agendas are varied” (118).

Anson then critiques the effectives of high-stake writings such as SAT writing exams. These closed systems are (1) a-contextual in that they have no purpose other than to test, (2) have no functional audience, (3) are conducted under conditions not similar to any in the world of meaningful written discourse, (4) have prompts restrictive in structure, language, and other variations, and (5) provide no useful feedback (119).

Anson concludes his essay with another scenario. Alyssa’s mother Angela steps into, and rather than have their daughter point and identify artist prints, she provides Alyssa with art materials for her own enjoyment, varied art projects such as postcards and pictures for her parents, grandparents, and relatives. Alyssa has tried to imitate in her own way the paintings framed through the house as well as her own representations of he friend, yard, and beagle. Alyssa is able to now display her developing knowledge or art and her own abilities. Art is no longer about testing but about Alyssa (125).

Anson, Chris M. "Closed Systems and Standarized Writing Tests." College Composition and Communication 60.1 (2008): 123-128.

Suzanne Rumsey's "Heritage Literacy"

Just today I received an email from a former student nearing the end of his student teaching experience. As Ryan expresses his interest in graduate studies in literacy, I remembered a long-ago interest I had in literacy and decided to explore literacy again. I came home to find that the new issue of College Composition and Communication had arrived and one article was on literacy. Because of Ryan, I read Suzanne Kesler Rumsey’s “Heritage Literacy: Adoption, Adaptation, and Alienation of Multimodal Literacy Tools.”

I like the article. Rumsey begins by sharing an interview/visit with an Amish neighbor Mary and her thirteen-year-old daughter Elaine. Although the two of them are devout Amish, the sixth grade Elaine attends public school until the eighth grade when Amish finish their formal education. Elaine likes and feels comfortable in school as Amish. She does all the work other children do including computers. Her mother approves because she knows computers are valuable for those who work outside the Amish community, and Mary clarifies, “. . . you have to be able to communicate with other people too.”

Rumsey then discusses four “types” of literacy portrayed through this interview.

1.“Elaine is engaged in mainstream academic literacy practices” (575).
2.“Elaine is learning computer literacy to some extent” (575).
3.“Elaine exhibits. . . . Amish literacy, or the reading and writing of texts particularly associated with the Amish way of life and beliefs within their ‘immediate community” (575).
4.“Elaine also exhibits. . . ‘heritage literacy’” (575).

The rest of Rumsey’s article explains what she means by “heritage literacy.” Rumsey defines heritage literacy as “how people transfer literacy knowledge from generation to generation and how certain practices, tools, and concepts are adapted, adopted, or alienated from use, depending on the context” (575).

She illustrates and elaborates on heritage literacy with the extended metaphor of quilt making in her own family for four generations of women from her great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and herself. Her great-grandmother was Amish but left the church as an adult, and Rumsey demonstrates how those Amish roots pass down through generations, exemplified through quilting—a literacy of heritage.

She states, “Literacy practices pass back and forth between generations; the old inform the new, the new impact the old” (577). And she further clarifies that “heritage literacy shows interdependence between generations as the new generation depends on the old for their intellectual inheritances, and the old depends on the new for innovations and adaptations, as well as adoptions of literacy traditions” (578).

With her quilt examples, she shows how the color schemes and patterns still reveal an Amish identity and a sense of Amish order even if the family has not been Amish for three generations. She also explains how quilting exhibits multimodality because it uses several modes to create meaning—text, pattern, color, visual, image, and space.

Rumsey points out that heritage literacy takes place outside of school settings, that it is most often informal learning. She briefly uses cooking and family recipes as an example of heritage literacy where rarely are their formal instructions but observing, modeling, practicing through trial and error.

So Ryan and his wife Rachel are establishing their own family heritage literacy with their own little ones as they both reach back to their past generations to shape the lives of the next generation.

Of course, I couldn’t help but think of turning the” heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers” (Malachi 4:6).

This article also emphasizes for me again the value of the Literacy Me-Quilt assignment we do in English 450 Rhetorical Studies. The inspiration for the assignment comes from a quilt my own Grandmother Birdie Keller made for our wedding gift. The students are to create at least nine quilt blocks representing different literacy moments in their lives. After completing the quilt, they write a reflective essay explaining the significance of that experience in their lives.

This is a good article to renew my interest in literacy studies.

Rumsey, Suzanne Kesler. "Heritage Literacy: Adoption, Adaptation, and Alienation of Multimodal Literacy Tools." College Composition and Communication 60.3 (2009): 573-586.

Patricia Bizzell's "2008 Exemplar Award Remarks"

Patricia Bizzell has been one of my rhetorican heroes for years. I’ve long admired her because of her clear understanding of classical and contemporary rhetorical theory. In an effort to strengthen my rhetorical background, I have relied on Bizzell and Herzberg’s The Rhetorical Tradition both for their critical introductions and primary selections. (I forgot that Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg have been married for thirty years.) For many years, I have tried to attend her sessions at CCCs because I like how she incorporates classical rhetoric into our contemporary classrooms.

But after reading her “2008 Exemplar Award” published in College Composition and Communication, I learned to appreciate her more both as an individual and as a rhetorician. It was good learning of her professional history, and how her history is based on students and teaching. Here are some of the points she highlights in her address (590).

•“I’m glad I got into the field of rhetoric and composition studies.”
•“I’m glad I got involved in work on students who struggle with academic discourse, and in work on rhetorical theory.”
•“I’m I’ve stayed at a small college where I can teach undergraduates in both writing and literature courses and learn from colleagues across the curriculum.”
•“I’m glad I’ve developed so many sustaining scholarly friendships.”
•“I’m glad I was able to live in a family and raise children through it all.”

Bizzell continues to influence me. I too am so grateful for being involved with rhetoric and compostion, for being at a two-year college that became a four-year university, for being at a student-centered institution that fosters both innovation and tradition, for my students who continue to motivate me to learn and grow, and especially for my family who supports and sustains me in all that I do.

Rumsey, Bizzell, Patricia. "2008 Exemplar Award Remarks." College Composition and Communication 60.3 (2009): 587-590.

Kathleen Yancey's "Re-desiging Graduate Education in Composition and Rhetoric"

The exogenesis of Yancey’s article on re-designing English graduate education is that she stepped into an opportunity to envision a new graduate program in rhetoric and composition at Florida State University. With the untimely deaths of Wendy Bishop and Rick Straub, the program was receptive for a new direction, but Yancey and the faculty had not yet determined that direction.

As I read this article, I naturally began to consider our own recent English program creation and inception as we became BYU-Idaho. Ours was a rare opportunity to develop a new program without pre-conceived structure and restrictions. It is rewarding to see that some of our choices in creating BYU-Idaho’s undergraduate English program mirror some of what Yancey and others created at Florida State University.

Yancey begins by discussing the concept of remixing. At first I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I’ve gathered that remixing is nothing more than the combining of alternative versions, ideas, narratives, sources, mediums, genres, and approaches to reexamine and rethink their program. So our university’s long-standing principle of “rethinking education” meshes with the philosophy of taking the traditional and reworking it with new or alternate approaches to establish a new program. BYU-Idaho’s reworking of general education into Foundations, is an ongoing example of remixing.

Yancey emphasizes that the remixing of the traditional/classical/tried approaches or subjects is a means of invention and creativity—the creation of new texts, new curricula, and new programs.

Yancey and her colleagues took the traditional courses of composition theory, rhetorical theory, and research methodologies and remixed them with visual rhetoric, digital revolution, and cultural convergence which resulted in a program strong in both traditional rhetoric threaded with technologies and multimodalities.

Yancey stresses “whenever we create curricula we build on other curricula” which becomes a form of remixing. So their traditional rhetoric courses are now incorporating in all classes blogs, multimedia, electronic literature, visual rhetoric, electronic portfolios, Web 2.0, and cyberliteracies in addition to guest speakers, student presentations and symposiums, peer study groups, and digital workshops within digital centers.

Two related questions they ask within the new core course Digital Revolution and Convergence Culture include: (1) “what difference does technology, especially digital technologies, make in the ways that we write, the ways that we read, and the ways that knowledge is made, sanctioned, and shared?”(2) “what do these changes related to digital technology mean for those of us who teach reading, literature, and writing, now and in the future?”

These two questions demonstrate how they have remixed the traditional with what they anticipate will be the future.

I see the same in what BYU-Idaho’s English program has done specifically with English 252, English 321, English 450, and English 495. We just haven’t incorporated technology into the courses, but we have tried to anticipate the needed skills our students must possess to be successful in a fast changing job market—for most of our students, their careers will depend on their abilities to integrate, challenge, and create new genres, mediums, modalities to meet the demands of professional and public written, visual, and oral communication.

Yancey agrees with Carl Raschke’s declaration in The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University (2003) that today’s world is in the midst of a “third human transformation. The first was the invention of language, the second the invention of writing, and the third the invention of digital spaces.”

Like Yancey, I see that BYU-Idaho’s program has benefited from the “remixing” that occurred as we created our new program, improving upon a traditional program, our program has begun to be evident through similar changes at other institutions nationally, and our program has demonstrated that we represent a “generation of change,” built on a previous generation as we prepare the way for a future generation.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Re-designing Graduate Education in Composition and Rhetoric: The Use of Remix as Concept Material, and Method.” Comput Med Imaging Graph (2008), doi: 10.1016/j.compcom.2008.11.004.

Marilyn Cooper's "The Ecology of Writing"

I went to this year’s CCCC’s session “Becoming Ecocomposition,” and I didn’t have a clear idea what it would be about. I thought it would have to do with ecology and writing about environmental issues. When Marilyn Cooper introduced herself as the chair of the session, I was surprised that people applauded. That doesn’t happen, so I knew she was someone I should have known. In the session, both presenters Christian Weisser and Sidney Dobrin referenced Cooper’s College English article “The Ecology of Writing” as the beginning of ecocomposition. So I decided I’d read Cooper’s article.

Her writing is clear, precise, and accessible. And she makes sense. Her primary point, which also is the principle point of ecocomposition, is that writing is a social-rhetorical activity—that writers do what they do and are motivated to do what they do because of social situations. She claims that like ecology (the science of natural environments), writing is ecological because it functions within social environments: Cooper offers, “What I would like to propose is an ecological model of writing, whose fundamental tenet is that writing is an activity through which a person is continually engaged with a variety of socially constituted systems” (367).

She continues to explain that humans are both the result and the cause of their environments and that writers interact with multiple, dynamic, interlocking systems as they write. She lists five broad systems in which writers work.

1.System of ideas. “The system of ideas is the means by which writers comprehend their world, to turn individual experiences and observations into knowledge” (369).

2.System of purpose. “The system of purpose is the means by which writers coordinate their actions. . . Purposes, like ideas, arise out of interacting” (369).

3.System of interpersonal interactions. “The system of interpersonal interactions is the means by which writers regulate their access to one another.” Cooper explains that two factors determine a writer’s interaction with others: intimacy and power (369).

4.System of cultural norms. “The system of cultural norms is the means by which writers structure the larger groups of which they are members. One always writes out of [within] a group” (370).

5.System of textual forms. “The system of textual forms is, obviously, the means by which writers communicate. . . . A textual form is a balancing act: conventional enough to be comprehensible and flexible enough to serve the changing purposes of writing” (370).

Cooper uses the metaphor of a spider’s web to explain the ecology of these systems. A web, “in which anything that affects one strand of the web vibrates throughout the whole” (370)—their interconnectedness.

Cooper also focuses heavily on audience, and specifically responds to Ede and Lunsford’s “Audience Address/Audience Invoked.” She explains that the Ede/Lunsford audience is very social: each other, a specific editor, colleagues, people they know from conferences. The social environment becomes the motivation and purpose for their writing (372).

Cooper proposes these ecological questions to encourage us to explore the social environments in which we write:
•What kind of interactions do writers and readers engage in?
•What is the nature of various roles readers play in the activity of writing?
•What institutional organizational arrangements encourage writer-reader interaction?
•How do writers find readers to work with?
•How do writers and readers develop ideas together?
•How do writers and readers alter textual forms together? (372)

Cooper concludes: “Writing is one of the activities by which we locate ourselves in the enmeshed systems that make up the social world. It is not simply a way of thinking but more fundamentally a way of acting” (373).

Cooper, Marilyn M. "The Ecology of Writing." College English 48.4 (1986): 364-375.

Kathleen Yancey's "Writing in the 21st Century"

Kathleen Yancey is NCTE Past President, and she submits this report to NCTE members with a call to support writing in the 21st Century. She gives us three challenges:

• Develop new models of writing
• Design a new curriculum supporting those models
• Create models of teaching that curriculum

Yancey begins with a historical perspective of themes and writing instruction in 20th Century America. She claims:

1. “Writing has never been accorded the cultural respect or the support that reading has enjoyed, in part because through reading, society could control its citizens, whereas through writing, citizens might exercise their own control.”

2. “Reading—in part because of its central location in family and church life—tended to produce feelings of intimacy and warmth, while writing, by way of contrast, was associated with unpleasantness—with unsatisfying work and episodes of despair—and thus evoked a good deal of ambivalence.”

3. “In school and out, writing required a good deal of labor.”

4. “Writing has historically and inextricably been linked to testing.”

5. “Without a research base or a planned curriculum—which were the central components of reading, and, likewise, the central components of all disciplines—composition tended to take on the colors of the time, primarily its identification as a rudimentary skill and its predominant role in the test of students.”

She continues her historical perspective by explaining in the 20th Century writing instruction was greatly influenced by science (writing could be researched and studied), progressivism (curriculum focused on the student and everyday writing), process writing (the recursive nature of the writing process through pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing), and personal computers.

Yancey then articulates Writing in the 21st Century. She claims “with digital technology and, especially Web 2.0 it seems writers are ‘everywhere” with what Deborah Brandt calls “self-sponsored writing.” Yancey suggests further than much of this new composing, writers wish to share, to encourage dialogue, but most to participate. She calls the 21st Century the Age of Composition where writers write not through formal instruction alone but through non-academic social “co-apprenticeship” where there is less emphasis on experts and more on peers sharing knowledge [such as WikipediaI, blogs, FaceBook, texting, emails, etc.].

Yancey suggests, “first, we have moved beyond a pyramid-like sequential model of literacy development in which print literacy comes first and digital literacy comes second and networked literacy practices, if they come at all, come third and last.” And “second, we have multiple models of composing operating simultaneously, each informed by new publication practices, new materials and new vocabulary.”

She concludes with her three challenges for writing instructors in the 21st Century:

“Articulate the new models of composing developing right in front of our eyes.”

“Design a new model of writing curriculum K-graduate school.”

“Create new models of teaching.”

As I read this article, I continued to think of our articulated BYU-Idaho Learning Model and our mantra of “Rethinking Education.” Many at the university continue to examine, refine, and reinvent our writing instruction to meet the many demands and growing changes our students will face in the future through rhetoric and technology.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Writing in the 21st Century.” February 2009. NCTE. http://www.ncte.org/library