The goal of college writing classes is that students will gain not only knowledge of the “threshold” writing concepts that characterize academic writing (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2015), but that they will also develop the agency and self-efficacy to employ those concepts in deconstructing writing tasks and constructing corresponding written products.
We want students to emerge from our classes able to “own” complex writing tasks, and by this we mean that we want students to be able to independently deconstruct such a task and then and construct the requisite piece of communication.
Writing is a particularly fruitful area for teaching growth mindsets, goal-setting, self-regulation and design- and process-thinking. This is because few people think of themselves as naturally great at writing, so though they may approach writing in a way that resists process or simply follows rules, they generally see that there is room for improvement and greater ownership in their approach. This is also because academic writing is in fact a process that involves coordinating and orchestrating multiple components, because writing and language learning are by nature individual yet involve engaging in structures that are socially constructed, and because writing can be broken down into discrete parts that can be taught. Finally, there is no ceiling for writing; writing is always a “work in progress.” Thus writing lends itself not only to design or process approaches, but to the related concept of automation or, perhaps better phrased, automaticity.
To what extent would foregrounding the use of computational or algorithmic thinking in writing instruction serve my end goal of students designing their own composing processes and achieving appropriate results by independently and flexibly choosing from reading strategies, note-taking strategies, invention strategies, and strategies for analysis and other thinking modes?
If my instruction already involves “breaking down” assignments for students, which involves computational thinking on my part, how can I more intentionally assist students in developing their own abilities conceptualize writing projects for themselves in ways that involve both breaking down and assembling?
A perennial question for writing teachers, whether we have been trained as compositionists or rhetoricians, has to do with which pedagogical theories and resulting choices have been demonstrated to support college writing students in “owning” complex academic writing tasks in this manner.
Within the field of composition studies, theory-based pedagogical paradigms over recent decades have included an emphasis on writing as a process (progressing from pre-writing and planning through drafting and revising), an emphasis on the socially constructed nature of communication such that fundamental structures of thought and language cannot be taught because these are learned in the context of discourse communities (Bizzell, 1982), leading to a pedagogical emphasis on discourse conventions. Influenced by a constructivist view of learning (Bates) and the resulting “social turn” in writing instruction, recent frameworks such as genre studies and Writing About Writing (WaW) have taken various views on the role of scaffolding in supporting student’s development of the knowledge of an ability to employ writing concepts ranging from discourse conventions to processes to metacognition in selecting and employing such conventions and processes.
The WaW movement approaches instruction of first year composition (FYC) as teaching “ways of thinking about how writing works” (Wardle & Downs, 2014, p. 3) rather than as teaching formulas for writing. Wardle and Downs suggest readings, assignments, and scaffolding for FYC organized around research by Ray Land and Jan Meyer on “threshold concepts.” Rather than emphasizing writing in specific modes or genres, WaW pedagogy directs students to develop and transfer an understanding of threshold concepts such as “writing performance is informed by prior literary experiences” and “writing is dependent on the situation, readers, and uses it’s created for” (p. vii). The push to develop “threshold concepts,” by which students can reconstruct their assumptions about writing is articulated in Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s (2015) Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies. Adler-Kassner and Wardle locate student’s misconceptions and need to reconstruct understanding in four areas: rhetoric, textuality, epistemology, and writing process. These four areas provide large categories for instructors like me to consider in selecting course components. The editors used peer “crowdsourcing” to develop a bank of 37 concepts and definitions from the perspective of compositionists who are consciously working together to answer the push for standardized definitions of writing coming from testing companies, the Common Core State Standards, and state college curricular guidelines that do not necessarily reflect current research (5).
Another current pedagogical trend with roots in constructivism is that of genre studies. A helpful text on this approach, based on an initiative within the City University of New York (CUNY) system, is Soliday’s (2011) Everyday genres: Writing assignments across the disciplines, which emphasizes student construction of writing knowledge as, as socially constructed, both through “communities of practice” to boost students’ development of genre proficiency and through scaffolding and sequencing activities to support acquisition of writing knowledge within collaborative opportunities.
Both genre studies and WaW, together with the underlying notion of “threshold concepts,” foreground the goal of student ability to deconstruct and construct writing tasks, a key goal of my own approach to writing instruction. Over five years of teaching FYC, these approaches, along with an emphasis on process, have influenced my work to help students develop conceptual and skill level ownership of academic writing tasks. Two recent additions to my own theory of writing instruction and the resulting design of my courses have been, first, a realization (based on student surveys and observation of student work) that many students were progressing throughout the two-semester FYC sequence without developing a practice of note-taking, and that this was hindering their performance on research-based writing tasks, and a growing consideration of 21st century learning skills (link) as an emerging set of instructional goals that overlap with my goals of student agency in deconstructing and constructing writing tasks. 21st c skills (http://www.p21.org/our-work/p21-framework) such as critical thinking, problem solving, and adaptibility, reflective of current disciplinary methodso f knowledge aquistion and sharing and thus akin to genre studies, are increasingly driving the development of learning standards and the K-12 level and at the secondary level through movements such as the American Association of Community Colleges’ Pathways Project (https://www.aacc.nche.edu/programs/aacc-pathways-project/). Sentence: (described as connectivist by Bates) Though the theoretical basis for 21st c learning skills, such as design thinking and computational thinking (https://www.iste.org/standards/for-students) may still be more definitional than empirically tested (Grover), writing instructors would do well to consider how these learning objectives may already be present within writing studies, and/or may provide a lens through which to accomplish the always-challenging goals of FYC.
This post addresses how one 21st century capacity, computational thinking (CT), may serve as a lens through which to envision and evaluate writing outcomes related to my primary goal of student de-construction and construction of academic writing tasks. Computational thinking (www.google.com/edu/computational-thinking), defined by ISTE https://www.iste.orgas students’ ability to develop and employ strategies for understanding and solving problems in ways that leverage the power of technological methods to develop and test solutions,” includes an understanding of algorithmic thinking and the automation of complex tasks and problems that can result from algorithmic breakdowns of those tasks and problems. From this perspective, the primary teaching goals for FYC that I have articulated above can be reconceptualized as one in which students achieve greater automaticity in engaging in research writing, rhetorical analysis, and other complex writing tasks by approaching those tasks through selection of discrete skills involved, in other words, by creating algorithms. A key area in which this kind of algorithmic thinking becomes important in the writing process is at the pre-writing, or invention, stage. At this stage students must both conceptualize the entire writing task accurately, and begin to generate appropriate content. For an unfamiliar writing assignment, such as rhetorical analysis or a research article appropriate to a particular academic discourse community, knowing what content to generate and how to structure that content can be difficult for students to grasp. Appropriate scaffolding, as highlighted through the genre studies approach outlined by Soliday, is one key that I use to supporting students in generating content. Another is sequencing of prior instruction in threshold concepts (related to note-taking, source location and evaluation, considering of what constitutes a “researchable” question, and other key discrete concepts such as content generation or prewriting) that help students conceptualize a writing task as a design process (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyoZTUGzdGY). Another way to think about helping students develop appropriate content is through the discipline of classical rhetoric. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0060%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D1%3Asection%3D1 Aristotle’s system for rhetoric, which approaches communication as a persuasive act geared to addressing the deliberative, forensic, or ceremonial needs of a socio-political community, divides the process of creating a piece of communication into five canons: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Rhetorical invention http://communication.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228613-e-42, the first canon or stage, involves the discovery of content through addressing a series of topics or questions that interrogate the subject to help with clarifying the purpose and meaning of the communication. Aristotle’s approach to invention can be recognized as a he
εὑρίσκω “I find, discover”
The term heuristic is derived from the Greek verb for find or discover (Latinized as inventio or “invention”) and refers to a method for problem solving. In computer science, a heuristic is a series of algorithms. In classical rhetoric, a heuristic process can be thought of on a formulaic level as a series of techniques for generating content. However, Enos and Lauer (1992) reminded us that classical heuristics can also be thought of in a more artistic- and discourse community-oriented (i.e. author- and audience-oriented) sense in which the speaker works with what he or she knows about the audience and with the audience themselves to create meaning. For example, an effective persuader may create an argument that is based on the audience’s values. In this sense, Enos and Lauer argued that heuristic thinking is tekne, Greek for art or craftsmanship, the word root from which our technology is derived. Thus the application of 21st century learning paradigms brings to planning writing instruction brings us full circle to the original technological sense in which the nature of inventing complex spoken (or written) content was conceptualized in Western culture.
That reality is heartening given the fact that one caution for incorporating CT-based learning objectives in instruction is that “much of the recent work on CT has focused mostly on definitional issues, and tools that foster CT development….[though] large gaps…still exist that call out for empirical inquiries” (Grover & Pea, 2013, p. 42).
As I seek to be more intentional in helping students write in unfamiliar genres such as rhetorical analyses and research articles, a focus on heuristics (in perhaps both the more formula-driven and the more artistic, discursive sense) and on computational thinking may help me assist students in assembling the various “threshold concepts” they learn into writing effective and appropriate pieces. In much the same way an instructor must first problematize how to give effective feedback before building a strong (and more automated) feedback process, it may be be that students who, in addition to employing cognitive and metacognitive composing skills, are aware that they are using computational or algorithmic thinking to break down and eventually simplify and automate those parts into a more seamless (“automated”) writing process eventually gain more automaticity and ability to transfer these skills to future complex writing tasks?
Writing instructor Janice Odom, in Heuristics in the English classroom: Working the problem of drafting the research paper.
An article that chronicles another instructor’s work with students who may enter writing classes with a rule-bound mindset or who may resist engaging in the “breaking down” aspects of writing, such as writing first drafts, is Janice Odom’s “Heuristics in the English classroom” (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1097724.pdf). To get students to write effective first drafts, Odom focuses on the use of heuristics (a form of algorithmic thinking) as an alternative to focusing on the writing process, drawing on the work of compositionists Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee (Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, 2004) and referencing a rhetorical analysis assignment taught at Arizona State University by Odom’s colleague Katherine Heenan. Since I am currently teaching rhetorical analysis, and also sensing fruitful growth in students’ drafting and design processes (and hence in their “breaking down” and assembling of writing assignments), I want to add Odom’s and her sources’ ideas into the mix as I seek to move students toward exiting the class with greater automaticity in coordinating all the parts of a complex writing task.
A further way of reconceptualizing writing tasks as al
Define CT
Reservations
Example: grammar
CT to help me define my goal
Parallel my approach with Odom’s, from rhetoric, using CT as lens.
References:
Adler-Kassner, L. & Wardle, E. (Eds.). (2015). Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Bates, A. W. (n.d.). Fundamental change in education. Teaching in a digital age. Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/chapter-1-fundamental-change-in-education/
Bizzell, P. (1982; 2009) Cognition, convention, and certainty: What we need to know about writing. In S. Miller (Ed.), The Norton book of composition studies (pp. 479-501). New York: Norton.
Enos, R.L, & Lauer, J.M. (1992). The meaning of heuristic in Aristotle’s rhetoric and its implications for contemporary rhetorical theory. A rhetoric of doing: Essays on written discourse in honor of James L. Kinneavy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Gibson, A., Kitto, K., & Bruza, P. (2016). Towards the discovery of learning metacognition from reflective writing. Journal of learning analytics, 3(2), 22-36. Retrieved from http://learning-analytics.info/journals/index.php/JLA/article/view/4545
Grover, S., U Pea, R. (2013). Computational thinking in K-12: A review of the state of the field. Educational Researcher 42(38), 38-43. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0013189X12463051
Kivunja, C. (2014). Teaching students to learn and to work well with 21st century skills: Unpacking the career and life skills domain of the new learning paradigm. International journal of higher education, 4(1), 1-11. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1060566.pdf
Odom, J. (2009, Winter/Spring). Heuristics in the English classroom: Working the problem of drafting the research paper. The college english association forum, 38(1). Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1097724.pdf
Soliday, M. (2011). Everyday genres: Writing assignments across the disciplines. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Wardle, E., & Downs, D. (2014). Writing about writing: A college reader (2nd ed.). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
