Tag: ERWC 3.0

Transfer and the ERWC Template

On By guitarsophistIn ERWC, Pedagogy2 Comments

The concept of educational “transfer” is a hot topic in composition and rhetoric circles these days. Much of this interest is inspired by a recent publication, Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing by Kathleen Yancy, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak. Yancy and her co-authors ask “Do the knowledge and skills learned in a writing course transfer to other courses and workplaces?” and is it possible to “teach for transfer”?

Yancy et al found that college students tended to rely on what they had been taught in high school when writing for college courses rather than what they learned in their First Year Writing course. They redesigned the FYC course to emphasize a limited number of concepts:

  1. Audience, genre, rhetorical situation, and reflection
  2. Exigence, critical analysis, discourse community, and knowledge
  3. Context, composing, and circulation
  4. Knowledge and reflection (57)

To me, these concepts appear to be a mix of categories and of varying utility, though it is a positive step to look beyond the immediate course to the student’s future rhetorical situations.

ERWC and Transfer

ERWC has been interested in transfer from the beginning. In the ERWC document “Transfer and Engagement: From Theory to Enhanced Practice” Nelson Graff cites Smith and Wilhelm, who argue that four factors make it more likely that students will transfer concepts and strategies from one context to another:

  • Students have a command of the knowledge that is to be transferred.
  • Students have a theoretical understanding of the principles to be transferred.
  • The classroom culture cultivates a spirit of transfer.
  • Students get plenty of practice.

Graff notes that that is why ERWC repeats the same strategies across modules. ERWC is certainly an ideal environment for creating the conditions for transfer.

What Actually Transfers?

However, if we look at what kinds of concepts and strategies powerfully transfer from high school to college, the list is pretty small. In my experience, it includes the five-paragraph essay, Toulmin argumentation (in a simplistic and reduced form), and more recently, ethos, pathos, logos. I have a suspicion about why this is so.

In Thinking and Writing in College: A Naturalistic Study of Students in Four Disciplines, (a very interesting book, available here at the WAC Clearinghouse) Barbara Walvoord and Lucille McCarthy describe longitudinal studies of four classrooms. They collected assignments and student writing and interviewed instructors and students. One of their findings was that

Students in all four classes typically used the assignment sheet as a kind of recipe for completing the assignment. The sheet seemed often to supersede other models or instructions given in class or remembered from other situations. Students usually kept the assignment sheet beside them as they composed, consulting it frequently,especially when they felt confused. They tended to see themselves as following step-by-step the explicit instructions contained in it, and they often interpreted it very literally. (57)

This led to serious miscues. In the business class they studied, the students were asked to go to two different fast food restaurants and observe how they dealt with customers. At the bottom of the sheet, the instructor had written “Chapters 7 and 8 in the Stevenson text can provide guidance” (62). Because this instruction was at the bottom, many students made their observations before reading the chapters, but the categories they were supposed to use were in the assigned reading, so their data was almost useless.

This finding indicates that when students are confronted with a task, especially a task they have not done before (a common experience in higher education), they look for a step-by-step solution to the problem of doing the task, one that they can deploy in the moment. Eventually they realize that some of the tasks in their discipline, such as writing a lab report in biology or analyzing a case study in business, are recurring problems that require them to develop routine strategies.

Rhetorical Strategies as Solutions to Recurring Problems

However, before they get to that point, essay-writing in Language Arts is the most common recurring writing task they have encountered. The five-paragraph essay provides a solution to the recurring problem of “how to write an essay.” The Toulmin model, presented as a checklist, offers a solution to the “how to structure an argument” problem. It doesn’t really matter that students often fill in the checklist incorrectly, citing warrants that aren’t really warrants and backing that is just further supporting evidence rather than reference to a body of knowledge or a system of rules, as Toulmin intended. The model still serves as a content-generating device for making claims and supporting them.

Recent changes in standards for Language Arts have made rhetorical analysis assignments much more common. The Aristotelian appeals have become the standard solution to that recurring problem, generating a paragraph about each appeal.

ERWC 3.0 attempts to teach a broader range of rhetorical concepts, such as audience, purpose, exigence, kairos, rhetorical situation, and stasis theory. I do not think that these concepts will transfer unless students see them first as solutions to doing the immediate task at hand, and second, as possible solutions to recurring problems they will face in the future. We cannot teach them as simply content to be mastered.

What to Do?

How do we help them see these new strategies as useful? The ERWC template as currently structured does not reveal the writing task until the middle of the module, in the “Connecting Reading to Writing Section.” Though we may see the reading tasks as at least equal in importance to the writing task, the students are unlikely to see it that way. They think that the culminating task is the problem they have to solve. They will be thinking, “How will this weird new concept of ‘kairos’ help me write this essay? Will the essay be about kairos?”

The ERWC template is still one of the best vehicles we have for designing teaching units and courses that are conducive to transfer. It just needs a little adjustment. If the writing assignment is at least previewed in the “Preparing to Read” section, it will give the students a clear idea of where they are going, making the tools and experiences that are provided by the module more relevant to doing the task as they perceive it. Second, if the new concepts and strategies are presented in the context of possible future tasks and problems to which they may be relevant, students are more likely to remember them.

I am still exploring how this might be accomplished. But as a first step, I created a Flexible Module Planner that is a bit less linear than the current template. Comments and suggestions, as always, are welcome.

Works Cited

Smith, Michael W., & Jeffrey D. Wilhelm. Going with the Flow. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006. Print.

Walvoord,Barbara and Lucille McCarthy. Thinking and Writing in College: A Naturalistic Study of Students in Four Disciplines. Colorado State Univ. WAC Clearinghouse. Accessed 2 Dec. 2018.

Yancy, Kathleen. Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing. Logan, UT: Utah State Univ. Press, 2014. Print.

Module Writers’ Workshops: Key Points

On By guitarsophistIn ERWC, PedagogyLeave a comment

The ERWC program recently conducted two two-day sessions for module writers to prepare them to develop new modules for ERWC 3.0. This post summarizes the key points we addressed during these two days.

Process for Developing New and Revised Modules

We are asking module writers to submit a Module Proposal Form (Page 1, Pages 2-3), which contains six questions. The first three concern the issue or question for the proposed module, the texts, and the possible writing prompt. Answers should be submitted mid to late October 2017, to the Module Review Panel. Writers whose proposals are approved will be assigned to a writing group led by a member of the ERWC Steering Committee. The answers to the last three questions, which concern learning goals, California English language arts and English language development standards, and the rhetorical concepts emphasized in the module, will be submitted in late November.

Module writers will submit a mini-module by late November, 2017, that includes at least one activity under each of the secondary headings and thus completes the ERWC “Arc”: Preparing to Read, Reading Purposefully, Questioning the Text, Preparing to Respond, Composing a Draft, and Revising Rhetorically. This should be a potentially teachable module that would take two to three days of class time. Once approved, the writer will expand the module to include appropriate scaffolding for different populations and to address an expanded number of learning goals and standards.

ERWC 3.0 Assignment Template Outline with Key Questions

The handout “ERWC Assignment Template Outline with Key Questions” functions as a quick reference for module writers and is the starting point for most module development. It is also useful to help teachers get a quick overview of the full Assignment Template. The latest version is available here.

ERWC 3.0 Mini-Module: Jimmy Kimmel Monologue

The workshop used this module designed around a Jimmy Kimmel monologue on health care to introduce the concept of mini-modules and to demonstrate the new template.

Universal Design for Learning

UDL is a philosophy and a set of concepts designed to make learning tasks accessible to any student, regardless of background or possible disability. In general, this involves offering multiple choices in media, ways of engaging texts, and ways of responding. The goal is to produce expert learners who are motivated, resourceful, and goal-directed. You can access more detail in the Universal Design for Learning Principles handout.

Integrated & Designated English Language Development in ERWC

Many students in ERWC classrooms will be English Learners who should receive integrated and designated English language development (ELD) instruction. All new ERWC modules will provide resources suitable for integrated ELD, and some modules will also include guidance for providing designated ELD. Module writers should consult the English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework and the English language development standards. An executive summary is available here.

The design of ERWC already incorporates much that facilitates both UDL and ELD, but increased attention to providing appropriate scaffolding and choices for different populations will further enhance the effectiveness of our curriculum.

Assignment Template 3.0: New Key Cells

The ERWC 3.0 Assignment Template has many features retained from the previous template. Some sections (internally we tend to call them “cells”) have been renamed and some deleted. Some new key cells have been added, based on evidence from our previous i3 study, feedback from teachers, and new interpretations of theory and research.

Negotiating Meaning

This cell is about making meaning from text, including identifying points of difficulty and developing strategies for overcoming it. We want activities that develop both individual strategies and social strategies that involve pooling knowledge and working together.

Considering the Rhetorical Situation

When we started designing the original version of ERWC, most teachers were not very familiar with rhetoric. We decided to keep things simple and relied mostly on the Aristotelian concepts of ethos, pathos, and logos. At this point, these concepts are much better understood by teachers, and we want to include a wider range of key rhetorical concepts. The basis for this expansion is close analysis of “the rhetorical situation” of a text, which includes the author’s audience, purpose, and occasion.

Synthesizing Multiple Perspectives

At one level, a paper that contains words, facts, and ideas from multiple sources is a kind of synthesis. However, this cell is about more than that. Every reading has at least two perspectives: that of the author and that of the reader. A perspective is a viewpoint, a way of seeing. We can see the same object from different perspectives and thus have different interpretations of its value or significance. As authors engage multiple philosophical, political, and personal perspectives, and readers with different backgrounds engage their texts, confusion can ensue. Activities in this cell will be about strategies for recognizing different perspectives, engaging them, accounting for them, and representing them.

Considering Your Task and Your Rhetorical Situation

This cell in the second main section of the template, what used to be called “Connecting Reading to Writing” but which is now called “Preparing to Respond,” is where the writing task for the module is normally introduced, causing the student to begin to reconsider the readings, his or her notes and annotations, and previous activities in the light of the writing task. The focus is now on “How can I use this material?” This is relatively unchanged from the previous template, except that we are placing new emphasis on the student’s rhetorical situation, his or her audience, purpose and occasion for writing.

Making Choices as You Write

Previous versions of the template were somewhat weak on the writing process. We wanted to steer away from the five-paragraph essay, but offered an intro-body-conclusion model that was not much different. Our directions assumed for the most part that students were writing short essays. In ERWC 3.0, we are expanding our horizons considerably. We recognize that a student’s writing process may be recursive and non-linear. We support a variety of genres and organizational patterns. We allow for multi-modal projects that have written elements, but could also include visual and auditory components. And as indicated in the heading for this cell, we facilitate student choice throughout.

We have also renamed sections or strands of the template to more closely mirror the language of the “arc.” Instead of Prereading, Reading, and Postreading, we now refer to Preparing to Read, Reading Purposefully, and Questioning the Text within the domain of Reading Rhetorically. See the draft Assignment Template here for other changes.

Learning Goals & Formative Assessment

The previous version of ERWC offered numerous opportunities and suggestions for formative assessment. However, these tended to be assessments of the students’ ability to perform the tasks of the current activity. They were fairly local. In part, this was because the learning goals of the module were often written after the module had been completed. In ERWC 3.0, learning goals are front and center. In addition to a carefully designed short list of learning goals for the module, we also have opportunities for teachers and students to set their own personal learning goals. Learning goals, readings, activities, and formative assessments will all be aligned.

Course Matrices & Modules in the Mix

ERWC 3.0 will consist of two courses, a new 11th grade course and a revised 12th grade course. The current model is for each course to consist of eight major modules with mini-modules on rhetorical concepts and other key strategies in between them. Modules will be sequenced according to multiple variables including text complexity and length, rhetorical concepts, implementation of standards, genres, writing tasks, and other factors. In some cases we may ask a module writer to tweak the module for a better fit in a possible course position. We are still thinking about the “arc” of the course in relation to the “arc” of a module and how to incorporate specific text types required by the standards, such as Shakespeare, American drama, full-length novels, foundational American documents, poetry and short stories. In addition, we are creating four modules for each grade in high school that will incorporate both integrated and designated ELD. We will revise some existing modules and create new ones in order to support the implementation of comprehensive ELD within existing ELA courses.

Module Writing Tips

My mantra for module writing in ERWC 3.0 is “Shorter, simpler, smarter.” Because we have added some new and important cells, and because we are trying to address both UDL and ELD, with the added requirements of increased scaffolding and multiple pathways, it will be hard to achieve the first two terms. Still, it is a goal to keep in mind. I have made some suggestions for how to achieve this in another post on “Module Writing Tips.”