January 31, 2004
Unlearning
I came across an interesting article by Tina Blue recently, called "AP English Blather". Blue writes about the difficulties of teaching freshman who resist learning because they've been rewarded for weilding oversimplistic writing skills so well in high school. Such students need to let go -- to unlearn -- what they've been trained. To some degree this is true of most high school writers coming into my composition classes...they are "programmed" to organize their thinking in a particular "safe" formula and my work is exacerbated by having to undo the teaching of others.
This isn't just limited to AP English writers -- who admittedly will have the biggest chips on their shoulders about being asked to rethink their writing habits. (In many cases, AP English writers are also allowed to skip college writing classes...and end up being the very same English teachers that reproduce this problem! Additionally, many composition teachers were skilled enough to 'test out' of composition when they were undergrads, so most of the composition teachers I know NEVER TOOK composition...which leads to some interesting issues regarding transference and identification with the AP English students Blue mentions....)
But I think virtually all entering freshman come to the composition classroom trained to think in lockstep ways about the writing process. The classic example is the "five paragraph paper" -- a useful structure for a student who wants to merely survive any paper assignment, but it's also a meaningless formula that will never really move the student into new territority. When we're taught this in high school, we're trained to recognize that readers want a thesis with support, but that lesson in logic often gets lost in the quest for coming up with three main subpoints and meeting a page count. And when students are rewarded for following the form, their reliance on the form becomes reinforced as a shortcut to original thinking.
The five paragraph paper is a form that works on a superficial level. But college teachers need to get students to unlearn their habitual ways of relying on "safe" formulae and get students to take intellectual risks that don't just uncritically follow an imaginary set of predetermined rules. This is an issue that's routinely discussed by teachers of composition. It's not the structure or form that has to be "unlearned"...it's the habit of thinking that mimicking the form is "good enough" to succeed. The emphasis needs to shift to a more reflective, more analytical form where the logic of the argument itself determines its own pathway. Additionally, the writer's concept of audience needs to open up to a concept of multiple, generally well-educated readers rather than one stodgy teacher with a ruler in hand. This is why collaborative work in a composition class is so important; even if peer editing doesn't "fix" a paper, it certainly gets the writer used to writing for a broad audience with a critical mindset.
Dartmouth gives us some ways to teach structure that break out of this mold. Traci Gardner provides "Unusual Five Paragraph Theme" assignments to approach it from a creative angle.
I could go on forever about this topic... instead, I'll close by advocating "reflexive" teaching that gets the student to inquire into why she is doing what she's doing when she writes. Although I haven't read it yet, Donna Qualley's book, Turns of Thought: Teaching Composition as Reflexive Inquiry promises to be a helpful resource on this topic.
Trackback Pings
You can ping this entry by using .
Comments
I'd like to fuss a bit about the use of the "unlearn" locution employed to talk about what students face in college composition. I think it's not good pedagogy to tell students what they learned in high school was wrong and must now be unlearned. I also don't find it helpful to attack the 5 paragraph essay. Rather, I try to put it in its place. Most of my students are relieved to learn they don't have to follow some algorithm, that they can write "I" if it works, and that they can pursue an idea that interests them.
I've done a lot of inquiry into why students, when asked to write in some new way, fall back on what they already know. It's very complicated, I think, but understandable. If you are being asked to take an approach you've never used before--and you are unclear about how to proceed--then doing what you know may be the only option. Each writing task I assign in FYC has different pedagogical goals: and I try to sequence them so that each major paper builds rhetorically from the ones before. And I feel I have the obligation to show students how each kind of writing has an analogue in work and the professions. It's not just exercises for college teachers.
Pedagogically, I think it helps students to tell them that they already know a lot about reading and writing, but that their new course will show them how to read and write in ways they have not yet mastered. Often, in conference, a student will say "we didn't do assignments like this in high school" or "I've never tried to write like this before." My response: "Well, isn't that why you came to college, to learn what you don't already know?"
Good points, John and John.
For those who don't know, John S. is my boss, so anything I say here about how challenging it is to teach writing in college would be too self-serving. :)
John L., I find that a little bit of the "unlearn" rhetoric, carefully applied, helps put the students in the proper mindset, so that won't mistakenly assume that my job is to teach them a new formula to follow, and that the way to survive in college is simply to swallow the pet formula of whatever professor is grading you that term. I do make a big deal out of asking students to "unlearn" the notion that the way to get an A on an English paper is to produce a good summary of the assigned reading, but since most students don't have the five-paragraph essay internalized, I only attack it head-on in the margins of papers written by students who seem to have trouble moving beyond it. And, for all the crap it gets, this traditional form can be very useful for timed essays on midterms and finals.
Interestingly enough, I find that students who were on the debate team in high school are sometimes even harder to teach than the ones who have internalized the five-paragraph essay. The debaters know all about supporting points and transitions, but they tend to overuse repetition, and rhetorical questions, and tend to underplay appeals to logos/fact. And they are used to "winging it" -- sketching out an outline and letting adrenaline help them fill in the final shape when they actually deliver the speech.
Love the thought-provoking feedback here. JS: Your point about how critical writing contests consumer culture is really smart -- it explains student resistence but also encapsulates one bonus reason (beyond skills) that we need to teach it!
JL: When I say "unlearning," I think of it as a term that only applies to uncritical habits, not knowledge...I don't mean that students have been disinformed, per se, but mistrained. Your point that "unlearning" is a negative and relatively unproductive term is persuasive to me, though (maybe "retraining" or "relearning" is a better word, then?). The five paragraph paper is a matter of focusing on content and form without recognizing the context (audience needs), ultimately.
DJ: You hit the nail on the head about essay exams: true! It can help manage the time, as well as the information -- but again, this is why students memorize it: as a 'survival skill' rather than an avenue for shaping thought. Though your equivocation of AP English students (who pass one test) with high school debaters (who train in logic and practice research and argument for four years, usually) is not persuasive to me. The problem might be that they're used to the context of "being judged" and so they write that way. But they're often some of the best writers and researchers in the class (in my experience anyway) and they excel at in-class discussion (though you have to handle them special, often). I might be biased, since I debated throughout my hs & undergrad life :-) I know for a fact that forensics made me a better writer...and teacher, ultimately.
Afterthought: Both AP English and debate are forms of college prep that we shouldn't knock too hard, in my opinion. I (or we) shouldn't whine about the gifted students we get in our classes, because they're often the most rewarding to work with...it's just that we should recognize that it's just as frustrating to try to teach those who believe they know it all already as it is those who don't and don't want to learn. But of course, there's nothing more rewarding as a teacher than helping students change for the better, no matter what their level of preparation.
I was one of those good h.s. writers who had to unlearn a lot to become a good college writer. The biggest breakthrough for me was when I realized that different classes wanted different kinds of writing. I had been overgeneralizing and getting very frustrated when one professor's expectations totally contradicted another professor's expectations:
-one wanted you to use the first person, the next outlawed the first person
-one loved passive voice, the next hated it.
-one wanted section breaks & headings, the next hated it.
-one found no thesis where another found too complex a thesis
etc. etc. etc.
I wish that professors had outright stated: This is how to write a political analysis. This is how to write a literary analysis. This is how to write a philosophy paper (the hardest, by far...).
Even within a field, there are different types of writing, and of course in an English class, many many more. I think the crime is that too many teachers teach just ONE template, when they really ought to teach several.
Once I figured out that different classes would require different methods of writing, I quickly became a good writer again! Too bad I spent more than a year feeling totally knocked off my feet before figuring this out for myself!
After I regained confidence, I could knock out papers for various classes quite quickly with good results. The next step was experimenting further within each genre of paper; this didn't happen until I was a junior or senior, when I started taking lots of classes on the same topics and became a bit of an expert in the content, freeing me to experiment with the form.
Mike--Yeah, "relearning" seems better, though "learning" works for me, too. From early childhood we've had the experience of discovering our existing categories aren't adequate for new experiences (we learn to distinguish "doggie" from "horsie") so we develop new categories as well as new terms for them.
ms. frizzle's comment echoes a long conversation I had during office hour this afternoon with a student. It started when she said she'd never had to write in an unstructured way before. I suggested our current analysis assignment has a lot of structure to it. She agreed, but explained that all through high school (in both AP and Honors classes) she had been told what to write and how to write it. She likes the experience of having to struggle herself to figure out what the point of a story is, but her view is that it never happened in her high school classes. As several noted here, it's the shock of discovering different approaches are required for different writing situations that we're dealing with. For what it's worth, all three of my first-year comp courses have a different rhetorical task for each assignment, from something as narrow as writing a summary of Hemingway's "My Old Man" to something as open as the "risk paper" where the scoring guide says 50% of the grade is based on the risk the writer has taken. That assignment often produces the best writing of the term.
Wow... great comments.
Mike, I'm thinking of my recent experiences with a few students... I certainly don't mean to suggest that debate isn't good training for writing. I do have to adjust my teaching technique to meet the special needs of students who are confident in their communication ability (and who like to try out their debate skills when I hand them back their graded assignments!). Just because they are a challenge to teach doesn't mean they aren't teachable.
Ms. Frizzle, your point was helpful... our "Seminar in Thinking and Writing" course isn't set up as a genre course -- we have some cultural content to cover, so I perhaps haven't been as careful as I could to delineate the rhetorical context that dictates the form of the paper I'm asking them to write. I do think I'm doing a better job in the "Intro to Lit Study" course, where the students will write papers using forms for creative writing, literary analysis, and journalism, along with the typical researched term paper.
John L. -- I love the "risk paper" idea... I think I can work that into one of my "Intro to Lit Studies" papers.
This was an interesting piece, Mike. It is likely that good students in high school will find the basic classes in college too easy and thus miss opportunity for further learning. Writing is particulary tough. It must be among the most difficult skills to teach, and it require practice over a long period of time. That goes against everything that consumer culture "stands" for. But I agree with what I think is one of your points--students who can organize their writing around a genuine problem can then let the issue dictate much of the form of the paper. They still have to impose organization, but they decide for themselves how to support their arguments.