A New Type of University Writing Course
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Bradley A. Hammer teaches in the University Writing Program and Program in Education at Duke
Durham, NC -- When I tell people I’m a writing professor, I see first-hand how their anxieties about grammar instruction and the “red pen” live on years after their experiences with freshman composition have ended. When talking about what I do, people start clarifying their diction, altering their grammar, even avoiding eye contact.
Yet, for the hundreds of thousands of high school graduates now entering college, I have one assurance as you head off to school: The world of college-level writing instruction is vastly different from the traditional courses offered even a few years ago. Although there’s an ongoing controversy about how and what to teach, what’s clear is that technology has altered radically what it means to write both in and for today’s world.
In great contrast to only a few years ago, most of my students write several hours a day. I’m not talking about technically perfect papers, focused on grammar and the rules of structure. These students are tirelessly blogging, texting and responding to their peers in lengthy e-mail. And rather than dismiss this kind of writing as lacking in academic merit, I’ve started thinking about how schools can embrace, in academic ways, the emerging forms of writing students have already claimed as their own.
Like many people, I can’t even remember the last time I received a personal letter in the mail. For most incoming freshmen, the Internet has become the sole medium for written exchange. Clearly, the social, commercial and academic reasons for why and when we write are changing both rapidly and fundamentally.
As part of this change, technology has radically extended the spaces for academic debate. In real ways, blogging and other forms of virtual debate actually foster the very types of intellectual exchange, analysis and argumentative writing that universities value.
Meanwhile, high schools and their curricula are failing to keep pace with those same advances. They remain focused on “standards,” asking such questions as: Do blogs prepare a student to take the new SAT? Does an e-mail message train a student how to write a traditional college-level essay? Clearly, the answer is no.
But in my courses, students write blogs, and few traditional papers. This isn’t just a gimmick to act young in an old game. They write blogs because we now live in a world where both debate and publication happen predominantly in virtual spaces.
In addition to blogs, they also maintain websites where they learn to interact with other writers beyond the isolating confines of classroom. They defend their analyses and argue with real purpose because they are forced to be conscious of an audience beyond the limited scope of the instructor. Consequently, they are learning to both think and write critically in ways that promote both inquiry and genuine interest in writing and thinking.
Often they’re shocked to discover that effective academic writing is more complex than adherence to grammatical rules. They’re arguing, debating and, yes, writing about real-world issues in a context that the traditional classroom fails to offer. As they publish and are responded to online, the students learn about the structures of academic language while supporting their growth as public thinkers and disseminators of knowledge.
In contrast, “standards-driven” high school writing is hindering student interest. Without real opportunities for students to publish their writing, they will assess that they write not for meaning, intellectual discovery, communication or understanding, but rather in obligatory, outdated, punitive and procedural ways to obtain grades. Consequently, as students spend their years of education consumed with standardized tests, they learn to write -- and think -- in ways that fail to offer rich and critical contexts for learning.
Teachers seek opportunities for writing to both engage and challenge students to think critically throughout the processes of intellectual debate. Writing courses that remain wedded to the genre and methods of the past merely limit students’ ability to imagine their work as real. The traditional argumentative essay does not force students to engage critically with complex reasoning “about” an issue, but rather merely instructs them on how to argue “for” or “against” it.
As summer comes to a close, college writing instructors are debating the contexts and meaning of their assignments. And many of them are abandoning the red pen in favor of new and engaging strategies for offering their students meaningful work.
