PEDABLOGUE

"Student Outcomes" is a continuing series of interviews with my former students who are now living life after college. Considering how much of our work is based on the assumption that "learning outcomes" will be met, I thought it would be a good way to catch up with them and to see what sort of impact college has had on their lives in the long term. Past students interested in participating should e-mail me. Comments, as always, are appreciated. -- Michael Arnzen

Kate Hursh (aka Kate Cielinski), Seton Hill U class of 2005 (& CMU class of '06)

Start with a brief bio that tells us first where you are now, then what your status was in college (e.g. "Creative Writing major, Volleyball player, Tetris fan, whatever.) Let your personality show.

I've justed started a new job; I'm supporting a group of engineers by utilizing my writing, coordinating, and teaching/training skills in a pioneering company in the nuclear energy field. After studying literature and creative writing in college, I went to grad school to pursue a master's degree in cultural studies. Grad school set me straight and I decided I didn't want the PhD I had once desired, so I returned to SHU to assist in running the writing center. Now I find myself oddly situated somewhere in the nuclear renaissance, and I'm enjoying the opportunity to soak up something new.

Tell us where you thought you'd be now, back when you were a college freshman.

I thought I'd be an art history professor. I switched my major to lit and writing when I had a taste of my freshman writing class. I learned that I liked writing about all kinds of things -- issues relating to education, gender, The Little Mermaid... In the end, I guess I didn't really love writing as much as I loved the subjects I was analyzing. This is probably why I ended up in cultural studies; I'm just fascinated by all kinds of STUFF, and I like thinking about how we, as producers and consumers of culture, relate to "stuff."

Describe your college experience in one word. Then elaborate in no more than five sentences.

Bizarre. I was fascinated by taboo topics (and the responses people have to them), so I often wrote about feces and menstruation. This has proven to be an obstacle when attempting to locate suitable writing samples for job interviews. I suppose that some people would find papers about gigantic poop-monsters to be offputting.

Describe one very specific lesson from the college classroom that you'll never forget. Give us concrete details. Tell us not only what it taught you, but also how and why it worked.

I was scared into becoming a better writer. In the second or third week of classes, my writing professor put a paper of mine on the overhead and tore it apart in front of the class. He said something like, "I'd give this paper an 'A' for its ideas, but an 'F' for its style." I wanted to crawl under the table. Even though my name had been covered on the overhead, I was so embarrassed to have followed a five paragraph essay format. It was such a very high school thing to do.

What do you know now that you wish someone would have taught you in school? How might that lesson best be taught?

I wish I had learned the importance of doing what I wanted to do. I'm attempting to re-career now that I've spent five years of my life pursuing a subject and career path that is painfully unappealing to me. As excited as I was in certain classes (those where I was granted permission to write about whatever I fancied), I hated the majority of my English classes. I abhored over 90% of the books and literature I read. That should have been a sign. Instead, I trudged on.

Very few people (regardless of age) know what they want out of life, but college students are particularly confused. They're bombarded with all these ideas about what and who they should be. Parents tell them what to do. Professors tell them what to do. P Diddy tells them what to do.

I could have possibly learned what I wanted to do by taking advantage of the career development office and internships. Career development offices can help students to explore options they did not know existed, and an internship is a much better way of trying a job on for size. When I advised students, I was constantly talking to them about the importance of exploring different majors and going to the campus career development office to tap into its useful resources.

What teaching method(s) were you subjected to that never made a dent on your learning?

Group learning was consistently awful and useless, especially in classes where professors relied on it as the sole method of teaching. All it really showed me was that most people are lazy and disrespectful, but I can't say that was a lesson I hadn't already learned.

What college experience did you find most displeasing at the time, but now recognize as an important contribution to your learning?

Presentations. I used to hate them, but I now realize the value they hold and all of the fantastic practice they gave me for leading my own classroom and capturing an audience's attention.

What habits -- good and bad -- did you pick up in school, that you still continue to apply?

Good habit: awesome research and critical thinking skills.

Bad habit: waiting for validation from others. I'm just beginning to act my own without any need for an 'A' paper or a pat on the back.

What do you miss about the college classroom, if anything?

I miss having the opportunity to be completely selfish. I was lucky that I could soak up the college experience without having to pay for my tuition or other bills (well, I did have to maintain my GPA in order to earn my scholarship). Although I regret that I didn't pursue a major that would ultimately satisfy me, I am so, so thankful that I had a chance to just be a student. I would do anything to once again be a fulltime student without any financial worries.

If there was one suggestion you would make to college teachers everywhere, what would it be?

Never make your own book a required text. Even if it's the best book ever written on the subject, don't do it. That leads to a classroom situation that is just too awkward. Spare your students. Spare yourself.

THANK YOU, Kate, for sharing such honest and useful insights. Thanks, too, for all you did to help others in the writing center. We miss you at SHU!

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Read more "Student Outcomes"!

My essay on the teaching of horror fiction -- "The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory" -- just went live in the debut issue of the journal, Transformative Works and Cultures. Here's the abstract:

"The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory" by Michael A. Arnzen

Abstract:

Building on the foundational concepts of transformative learning theory, I argue that horror fiction strongly encourages perspective transformation by challenging student assumptions about both genre writing and educational experience. I informally describe a specific creative writing class period focusing on the motif of the scream in diverse horror texts, and I illustrate how students learn to transform what they already bring to the classroom by employing a variety of particular in-class writing exercises and literary discussions. Among these, transformative writing exercises—such as the revision of an existing text by Stephen King—are highlighted as instructional techniques. As cautionary literature, horror especially dramatizes strategies of fight versus flight. I reveal how students can learn by transforming their knowledge through disorientation that is particular to reading and writing in the horror genre.

I started thinking about the ideas in this article after writing a blog entry back in 2005 called "Shifting the Paradigm: Transformative Learning Theory" -- a response to an essay I read by Kelly McGonigal called "Teaching for Transformation."

McGonigal's article got me to rethink the role of the reflective essay assignments in my classes, and I soon found myself in the library, catching up on transformative learning theory by reading the works of Jack Mezirow and others who seek to change the worldviews of adult learners. The key role of the "activating event" in transformation got me thinking about how "cautionary" tales and other works in the horror genre often trigger anticipatory thinking that requires a revision of what one initially assumed to be true. After applying these lessons to a course I taught in horror fiction writing last year, I captured some of these ideas in a conference paper in March 2008 at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts...an early draft of this now-published version. I invite comments here or at the journal, which includes a number of good articles on fan studies and popular culture.

I tried something new in my introductory-level fiction writing course this term: using a page of graphic fiction to show students how structure and the other elements of fiction (character, setting, viewpoint, etc.) work in tandem to make a story. I think it worked well, so I'm sharing the exercise here.

The idea was actually derived by the work itself (and I wouldn't be surprised if others have used the source material in the same way): 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, by artist Matt Madden (who maintains a related weblog, as well). The goal of Madden's 99 Ways, which was inspired by French writer Raymond Queneau's prose experiment, Exercises in Style, was to provide "as many variations as possible on a simple one-page non-story."

This is the template he provides on page one, which is followed by 98 graphic variations of the same sequence:

Madden calls this a "non-story" but it does have all the elements of a story, and these elements come to light when he draws and presents variations on the template: for example, one page (called "Subjective") has identical frames drawn from the point-of-view of the male character as he makes his way to the fridge; another (called "Upstairs"), depicts the same event in time, but shifts the viewpoint to the character above the spiral staircase who is responsible for calling down about the time. Many of the variations are radical and eye-poppingly ingenious, like the "Underground Comic" and the "Map" versions of the same template.

On the first day of class, I used this book in class by showing students a variety of these variations using the document/overhead projector, and simply asking them what exactly made each page different and unique. It allowed me to briefly touch on core elements of the craft, like character (in one variation, everything is the same except for the man, who is drawn like a cartoon skunk), viewpoint (there's a lot of these in the book, including a monologue where the male character sits behind a desk and talks about what we see in the template), setting (a la "upstairs"), and conflict. The point that I think was successfully made in class was that every single choice a writer makes can radically change the story as a whole, and that a virtual infinity of choices are available to the writer, constrained only by a core structure of sequence that readers need to make sense of a series of events.

What perhaps was most difficult to show here was the "plot" of the template. While I did ask the class "What's the conflict here? What is the core problem, or struggle that the character goes through?" they were slow to respond. They deduced that the man was hungry and needed something from the fridge, but was frustratingly interrupted on his way. I asked them about that interruption: "We don't see who the source of the voice is... is it a live-in lover? A housewife? Who?" They seemed to agree it was his significant other. But then I asked them if it might very well be God. This question -- while perhaps stretching into absurdity -- allowed me to suggest that this story might be saying something universally human and profound, or epiphanic, even if that "theme" wasn't on the surface at all.

But all of this was a precursor to an actual writing assignment, which was really my intention. I asked students to take Madden's template (I photocopied it for educational use) and write a short-short story of significance based on it. I did NOT give them any more specifics than that, and a few students sent me curious e-mails about how far they could change things. I told them their imaginations were the only limit, but that any reader in class ought to be able to tell that this was a variation that might have "fit" in the same book as the one I showed them in class.

The following class period I asked a few students to share some of their stories orally with the class as a whole. A lot of fun was had. I noticed that many of them added something new on to the end of the comic strip, as if it were all a precursor to something else, or as if "revision" only meant "adding." But it was a fruitful and productive exercise, I think, and I think most creative writing exercises try to do something similar: to posit a prompt or template idea that students later can share, to reveal the variety of choices (stylistic and beyond) which reveal the variety of choices that are available to a writer, and the repetition-with-a-difference that compels our fascination with storytelling.

Writing about this reminds me of other classes I've taught that have used comix in similar ways. It's been a long time since I've done so, but I recall once using a Garfield comic strip in my basic writing course. I photocopied a 3 panel strip of Garfield doing a monologue while looking at -- and then away -- from a sunflower in a pot. I don't even remember what wry commentary Garfield was making -- all that mattered to me was the structure. I blotted out all the words in the thought balloons and then photocopied (and enlarged) the strip before distributing the strip to students. I asked them to "fill in the blanks" of the thought balloons with the main ideas of their paragraphs. I was trying to illustrate the way that paragraphs don't simply chain together a list, but move a thesis through a process of thought that changes as the paper progresses. I'm not sure how successful that was, but I remember that the students enjoyed working with the handout and were excited to share the results in small groups.

I hope to look into Raymond Queneau's work for more ideas. But at this point I am convinced that making structure visual is always a good idea. This is why we diagram sentences and outline essays and use organizational charts. The structures of graphic fiction can make this process both entertaining and educational, while appealing to visual learners. I intend to keep looking for more ways to integrate such matters into the classroom. Your own experiences are welcome -- leave a comment.

The article is a couple of years old, but it's worth noting: "College, My Way" by Kate Zernike, published in the NY Times in 2006, notes the rising transfer rates among college students is becoming the new normal -- claiming that "about 60 percent of students graduating from college attend more than one institution, a number that has risen steadily over at least the last two decades."

Though this number is higher nationally than it is on my own campus, I still don't find this rate of transfer surprising at all, because I've seen the increase in transferring firsthand. The NY Times article suggests that today's "Millennial" generation approach their curriculum just like they do their iPods, selecting courses like singles that they're loading up into their playlists, making increasingly granular choices regardless of "brand affiliation" (eg. a lack of commitment to one's "alma mater.") Admissions offices call the high churn rate of transfer courses "swirling" -- a term I associate with toilet bowl flushes rather than academics, but it's still an apt term. Swirling is what helicopter wings do and it can leave you dizzy and disoriented.

I often staff the "transfer orientation" that our campus hosts during the summer, when incoming transfer students sign up for their first courses... and I have to tell you, as much as I enjoy transfer students (because they usually bring fresh perspectives into the classroom), it's often a nightmarish webwork of complexity trying to figure out what courses a student still "needs" to graduate, despite the useful and helpful audits of our registrars. The sum (diploma) always means more to these students than the variables (courses) that add up to it, and -- coupled with financial pressures that are only rising over the years -- for too many students a "survivalist" mindset drives their learning: many students just want to cobble together a schedule so they can finish their long-suffering and have a degree. Perhaps the way colleges sell themselves contributes to the problem. If a degree is something that can be acquired if enough "stamps" are earned, then it doesn't matter where you get those stamps.

But it is a bit out of the ordinary to earn a degree from one college -- an institutional endorsement of one's educational status -- while still having a transcript that quilts together several different colleges that made their imprint on the student in some fashion outside of the penumbra of the college giving the degree. Do these students feel attachment to their degree-granting institution as "alums" as much as traditional four year students do? Institutional identity evaporates beneath this to some degree, rending the early colleges that the student transferred out of as functionaries toward the final degree. I can imagine some minor forms of blowback that students wouldn't anticipate (e.g., imagine an employer who is a Yale alum reviewing a student's transcripts during the hiring process: Would they see the transfer out of Yale as troubling? Do they see a high "swirl" rate as a sign that a potential employee lacks commitment?)

There are also ways in which "swirling" renders a college's self-assessment problematic. If a school is surveying student attitudes or performance at various grade levels, comparing and contrasting and looking for statistical growth from freshman to senior year, what do the numbers mean if such a high percentage of those seniors have only been in residence for a year or two? Or that the freshman won't be around very long? How do retention committees and officers understand these numbers and marshal policies based on them? Even within any given academic major, swirling problematizes program review and if upper division courses have prerequisites that are built on assumptions about how those prereqs are taught locally, rather than universally, then most assumptions regarding progressive learning are essentially undermined.

Indeed, although it is nothing new (and often common among Adult and non-traditional learners) swirling requires a reformulation of not only what we mean by "traditional students" but what we mean by "progressive learning" across any given student's career. I think teachers concerned with such issues may find a review of Transformative Learning theory a worthwhile endeavor in this regard.