What are Students Thinking? -- Quoting the Dictionary

See the explanation of the "What are Students Thinking" post series, where I explain what these posts are about and what they are for.

For this first "What are Students Thinking" post, I'm considering why students quote dictionaries. This is one of those freshmen cliches that all teachers of first year writing know and abhor. Composition theorists have mentioned this problem in discussions of the positivist views of language many students hold. Our students, like many people outside of English departments, have an understanding of  language as fixed and definite. To them, words have explicit, singular meanings, and these meanings may be found in dictionaries. Dictionaries, to our students, are catalogues of the factual, unassailable, exact and, correct meanings of particular words. There is, for them, a naturalized understanding of the way words work, as if their meanings come from God, who directly inspired the prophet Webster.

When I talk about definition arguments with my students, I begin by foregrounding where definitions come from. Most students have never considered that dictionaries are actually written by people. Thus, definitions are, after all, the opinions of a collection of human authors and their editors. To demonstrate this, I like to show students definitions from Samuel Johnson's dictionary, which includes such gems as:

oats: a grain, which in England is fed to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

Centuries removed from Dr. Johnson's dictionary, we can see the very obvious class structure implied in this definition. Yet we take our own modern dictionaries as purely un-ideological repositories of linguistic truth. We don't register (or even know about) the political aims of Noah Webster's spelling reforms, undertaken in order to differentiate (read: un-Frenchify) American English. Instead, these definitions are taken to be givens.

For our students, this means that a dictionary definition gives them solid ground. After all, in asking students to write argumentative papers, we are forcing them to confront the continent nature of the conversations they join. They're finding out that truth is not as solid as they've perhaps been made to believe. The very process of argument emphasizes this. We all make contributions to a conversation, and no one is quite right, and maybe no one is quite wrong either. This is disconcerting, especially for students who just want the right answer, the one that's going to get them a good grade.

A dictionary definition, then, is at least one unassailable truth, a thing that cannot be attacked. A word, at least, is what it is and no one can count off because they disagree with it.

But even in the argument of definition papers I assign, where the continent, unsettled nature of particular terms and concepts is actually the point, I see these dictionary definitions cropping up. In fact, in the unit my classes are finishing up, we emphasized the continent nature of words, and talked about the histories of these dictionaries in order to denaturalize my students' views of language.

I even went so far as to just flat tell them, "you should not quote the dictionary in your papers for all the reasons we've been talking about." After all, the whole point was for them to build their own definitions and argue for their legitimacy.

Yet when the first drafts came in, I found dictionary definition after dictionary definition. What gives? Did students not believe any of the things I'd said about where these definitions come from? Did they just flat fail to listen? This seems like a pessimistic view of my impressively involved students. As I said in the intro to this series, I'm much more interested in the rhetorical choices students are making when they fail to meet expectations, especially those I've made pretty explicit. Students know that these definitions are not solid facts, but rater opinions. They know that the point of this assignment is to make definitions on our own. So why would they, nevertheless, default to these dictionary definitions?

A few of them actually cited the definition in order to problematize it. They quoted the definition then went on to write about how deficient the definition, and this culture's understanding of the concept, actually are. This is actually a fairly sophisticated use of these definitions. If I react only to the fact that the broke my "rule" against quoting dictionaries, I fail to give them credit for doing something that is actually quite advanced. Instead, maybe I have to consider such moves as a fair exception to my rule. But what of students who make the more typical move of using the definitions as the final authority?

Nancy Sommers, David Bartholomae and others have written about the difficulty in helping students to develop a sense of agency and authority in their writing. One of our tasks as first year writing teachers is to enculturate students into the expert world of academe. Part of our job is to help them sound like experts, even before they really are. But our students seem have a great deal of apprehension about this. After all, their role in education has always been as receptors of knowledge--vessels into which knowledge is poured by teachers who are assumed to know more than them.

The kinds of writing most of them have done before coming to college illustrate this. Before coming to college, students spend a great deal of time writing book report in which their goal is to prove they've read the book, essay tests where their goal is to show they've internalized the course material so that they have become conversant with it, and other such performative writing tasks. So, even in their writing, their goal has always been to show that they have learned other people's knowledge.

Yet, what we are asking them to do is to contribute knowledge--to create it. In asking them to formulate definitional arguments, I am asking them to assume the role of the expert. Students seem reluctant to do this. Again, their role has always been to learn from the experts, not to be them. Asking them to become experts has disoriented them. It may even feel presumptuous to them to assume such a role. They respond by defaulting to someone else's expertise, as if to say "I may pose my definition, but at the end, I'd better provide the real definition by the real expert."

So how do I counter this? How do I encourage students to assume their own agency and expertise? How do I convince them that their definitions are as valid as those written by interns and editors at Webster's, and are in fact probably better (because they haven't been simplified into one sentence).  These are open questions, but answers that we cannot arrive at unless we ask better questions than "weren't you listening when I said not to quote the dictionary?"

What are Students Thinking?

Writing teachers are full of pet peeves. This is perhaps inevitable since every time we experience writing habits we find distasteful, we do so while grading a huge stack of papers. This means that we experience these over and over so that it seems like language is infested with these things. The common response of many who teach writing is simply to complain a lot. We create lists of freshman cliches, which we share with one another or sometimes with students (I once had one such list designed to help students find these in their own writing. It was tellingly entitled "Ugh Words"). We create elaborate jokes, send terrible students sentences back and forth to each other, and create snarky internet memes (ironically, about the terrible things the internet is supposed to be doing to student writing). I myself have written a series of five-pararaph essays about why the five-paragraph essay is so bad.

What we often forget to do, to our own shame, is to try to figure out why students do these things. Perhaps this is because we assume that these problems in our students' writing exhibit some kind of natural deficiency in their processes, work ethic, or with the students themselves. In other words, we assume that the problem is with our students, and not with our ability to teach them. Students have these problems because they are lazy, waiting until the night before the paper is due without time to really revise or evaluate their own writing, because they simply aren't listening to us in class when we tell them what [not] to do, or because they just don't care that much.

I, on the other hand, prefer to eschew utterly pessimistic views of our students and the work they do, mainly because such views are not particularly helpful with regard to my own teaching. It is, instead, much more helpful to look at these common problems in our students' writing, not as natural deficiencies or personal attacks against me personally, but as rhetorical choices our students make. In other words, when these students go awry, what were they trying to do, why did it fail, and how do we help them do what they were trying to do in more acceptable ways.

With that in mind, I'm beginning a new segment of this blog that deals especially with these peevish problems in student writing with the goal of theorizing what students are doing when they make common mistakes, or rather, when they write in ways which seem totally acceptable and appropriate to them, but which we hate. Assuming that students aren't doing these things because they hate me and wish to attack me, or because they are idiots who can't be helped, or because the golden age of my university years has given way to the incoherence of net-speak, the goal of this series will be to try to develop our own pedagogies so that we may respond to these problems in ways that are optimistic and constructive.

The first is already in the hopper; it will deal with students who quote dictionaries, and it will drop later tonight or tomorrow. So be watching for it. Now, I'm off to eat tacos.

Where Does a Claim Come From?

I've been struggling this week to help my students understand how to arrive at a claim through synthesis of sources. Traditional composition classes have often involved writing assignments that allow ready-made opinion based claims. The model that I learned under years ago (I took only Comp 2, having tested out of Comp 1) involved getting students to argue about politics then turning this into writing. It was a model that was pedagogically vacuous for many reasons, but one of the most important was that it allowed us to make claims based on our own already held untested opinions. So, for the most part, we were simply regurgitating already held beliefs in terms of a three part thesis (Claim, evidence 1, evidence 2, evidence 3, transition).

Even the more sophisticated assignments I have given to students over the past several years have been confined enough that claims were limited to only a handful of possibilities. My auto-ethnography assignment tends to encourage claims about how the activities of a group are related to certain ethics of the group. My scholarly problem paper tells students to write about an important current conversation in the field, so this allows students to appropriate the claims of others. My other assignments re similarly constrained. Certainly, it's not possible (or less possible) to plug in the political opinions taught to them at home as claims, but the assignments still lead students to claims through the prompts. The assignment I'm starting with this semester, on the other hand, is much broader. It's based on synthesis of essays by four authors. The assignment doesn't, in and of itself, offer a research question that will lead more directly to a claim. For this reason, the possibilities are far less constrained, and the claims may be much more far flung. So long as the reading suggest these claims in an articulable way, the claim is appropriate.

The Need for a Heuristic: 

What this means is that, perhaps for the first time, I'm faced with the task of helping students develop claims in the much more open ways that I am used to working in. My students struggle to come up with claims that they feel are appropriate to the conversation, a conversation that they are, after all, just entering. They are, like I was, used to using ready-made arguments, in which they simply plug new pieces of evidence into claims they already hold.

Thus, I have been struggling to think of a heuristic to help my students understand where ideas come from. How do academic writers develop claims? Though, as an academic writer, I am developing claims from research all the time, I have not really engaged in a meta-discursive analysis of how this happens. Thus, when students stay after class to ask what I mean when I tell them that they should develop a claim to base their papers on, the process is almost as mysterious to me as it is to them. To use language Doug Downs might, I have "process knowledge" regarding how to arrive at claims, but I don't have the "declarative knowledge" to help my students do the same. This means I am having difficulty arrived at a useful heuristic to give to students.

In lieu of a helpful, more comprehensive heuristic of where claims come from, I've decided here to at least trace my own process in order to provide an example for students of how a claim happens, what influences go into making a claim, and what I do with it after I've found it. I'm writing this with two audiences in mind: my students who have, no doubt, already gone through the first steps of this process but now must figure out what to do from here, and to fellow instructors who want to help students understand where ideas come from and who want to understand this ourselves. Thus, what follows is a narrative about how reading leads to particular claims.

Arriving at a Claim: A Process Approach:

In the first unit of this semester, students engaged in the Writing about Writing approach here at OU have read four essays, which they must synthesize into an essay centered around an argumentative claim. These essays, in the order we read them, are: John Swales "The Concept of Discourse Community," James Paul Gee "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction," James Porter "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community," and Joseph Harris "The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing." All these essays, as suggested by their titles, involve the ongoing discussion of discourse community--what one is, how it works, and how folks get into one.

Swales offers a definition if discourse community, asserting that it's a concept that has been under discussion but which has not yet been carefully defined. In order to theorize a definition, he offers six criteria that any language community must meet in order to be called a discourse community. Important for this discussion is his final criteria that "a discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise" (473). His explanation of this criteria explains that a community will have levels of membership. Some will be experienced, subject area experts, while others will be novice or apprentice members. Members will come and go so that there is a range of experience and expertise in any discourse community.

Gee, on the other hand, has a much different idea about Discourse membership (by the way, his use of "Discourse" rather than "discourse community" is notable, as it projects certain attitudes toward the idea of "community").  For Gee, one is either in the Discourse or one isn't. There is no provisional membership. As he says it, "one cannot engage in a Discourse in a less than fully fluent manner" (487).  For Gee, one is apprenticed into a Discourse but is not fully a member until the group itself accepts the new member, which involves vesting the member with "social goods" (487).Thus, the salient difference between Swales and Gee is their understanding of how one gets into a community. For Swales, there is a process of enculturation where membership is, for a while at least, provisional and partial. For Gee, one is "mushfaking" (490) until one is admitted. Gee goes on to suggest that we should teach our students to engage in mushfake until one is accepted. At this time, the student can decide whether or not to fully engage as a full member or to subvert the discourse and rebel against it.

In reading this last part of Gee's argument, I notice that this seems to suggest a certain attitude toward Discourse. Why would we want to teach our students to subvert the Discourses they have worked hard to enter? The logical assumption here is that Gee doesn't think much of Discourses. Gee's argument about how one gets into a Discourse, which is that one must be admitted by the group, suggests that, to Gee, a Discourse is a good old boys' club--a hierarchal structure designed to let some in and keep others out. Gee seems to hold a psuedo-Marxist attitude toward Discourses as oppressive structures, otherwise, it makes no sense to want to empower students to overthrow it.

I want to take the time here to point out that my interpretation of Gee's attitude toward Discourse is necessarily influenced by my own perspectives and experiences. I notice these things and develop these interpretations because I have been exposed to Marxist critical theory, and critical pedagogy which stresses the importance of a de-centered classroom. So, my own views of the world and background in rhetorical and educational theory has caused me to notice certain things and interpret them in particular ways. And this is okay, because my interpretation, although personal, is nevertheless plausible. I can show that it is a reasonable interpretation and argue effectively for it. Thus, I am beginning to formulate a claim centered around Gee's ideas about Discourse membership and the possibly oppressive nature of Discourse.

This early claim is bolstered when we get to Porter's essay, which I am now reading with my early claim at least rattling around in the back of my mind. Porter, which is talking primarily about intertextuality as definitive of a discourse community (we're not communities in the traditional sense of shared space, language, etc, but in terms of shared textual practices, canonical texts, etc), claims that "our goal should be to help students learn to write for the discourse communities they choose to join" (94). He goes on to say that "our immediate goal is to produce 'socialized' writers who are full-fledged members of their discourse community, producing competent, useful discourse within that community" (95, emphasis added).

Here, I notice that Porter's goal of helping students enter their discourse communities is altogether different than Gee's goal to help students subvert them. Seeing other scholars suggest that we should help students join (which suggests that a discourse community is a good thing) bolsters my claim that Gee thinks Discourses are perhaps bad.

So now I have a solid claim that I can run with. Of course, my goal is not just to talk about Gee, but to synthesize all these essays. For this reason, I find that I need to broaden this claim in order to account for the other authors. So I expand my claim in order to come to a tentative claim that will include these other authors.

So my claim becomes something like this: These authors' views of discourse community membership, especially regarding the ways in which people join them, are connected to their attitudes about discourse communities.

Now I have a guiding idea that I can use to approach a paper. This acts as my thesis statement. My process now becomes using the texts to test this claim. As I write and revise a paper, I revisit the texts looking for evidence that these authors' understanding of membership might be guided by their attitudes toward communities, that is, whether they think these communities are good and that we ought to help students get in, or that they are bad and we ought to help students navigate them well enough that they can change them. This evidence becomes the body of my paper.

Conclusion:

This is the process I have undergone in formulating a claim based on these readings. As a student searching for a claim, the trick is to pay attention to the things you are noticing as you read. These things will be based on context. This is to say that you will notice different things based on your own views of the world, education, and pure chance. This is fine. Be comfortable with this, as it is part of the intertextuality Porter talks about.

When you notice things in a text, begin asking questions about these things. These are often referred to as the "so what" or "why" questions. What might these things you've noticed say about what you are reading? Why are these authors talking about things in these ways? The answers to these questions become early claims which guide the rest of your reading. If these early claims remain plausible or if they are in fact bolstered by further reading, you've developed a thesis for your paper. If not, you will begin noticing other things as you read further, and one of these will develop into a claim.

I have no doubt that there are other processes at work in developing claims, and other ways to come to them. But hopefully this will be helpful in helping us understand how claims come to be. Hopefully, by "watching" as I develop a claim, the reader will see these processes at work in himself or herself and will know how to turn these into workable claims.