Bass; Problems; Being Intentional

I was wandering through the Bass article yesterday right before my first year composition class. When I hit his sentence, "...I resolved to make every course component intentional" (2), I couldn't not think about my own imminent class. Was today, every part of what I'd set up, intentional? How much was I relying on models of past teachers and practices that worked for me? Had I made visible, and had I planned enough to communicate, the value of what we were about to do to the writers in my class?

Yesterday, the writers were to bring in a first draft of a literacy narrative (basically a history of how they came to be the reader and writer they are today). We'd read a variety of essays and narratives about literacy, literacy development, several literacy narratives, they'd written bits and pieces. For yesterday, they were to collect all they'd written and cull from it all a draft, a single text.  So I began the class by asking them to read their own text to themselves, making any changes (editorial or otherwise) that they wanted to. Then I asked them to reflect on where the text is in its development and where they imagine it could go, what they still wanted to work on, what parts they were particularly proud of, etc.

Then I collected the drafts and the reflections about their drafts and redistributed them randomly, and told the to just read what their colleagues had written. Don't do anything else, don't correct, don't edit, don't comment, just read with a sense of curiosity and discovery. I collected the drafts again and repeated the process. After this second reading, I asked them to reflect in writing on what they'd noticed in the drafts, what surprised them, and how they were now feeling about their own drafts (do they have new ideas about how to proceed? were there ideas they could steal for their own texts?). Then I sent them outside to walk around, to take a break for five minutes.

When they came back, I asked for some discussion on what we'd done so far, their thinking, why I was asking them to just read each other's drafts. Here I spent some time talking about why I wanted them to engage in this process (see below). After this discussion, I redistributed the drafts randomly, but this time I included a handout they were to use to offer commentary on the draft of their colleague (identify and explain why you find a particular passage interesting; identify and explain a passage that you'd like to hear more about; write out any questions you have for the writer that might help her re-see the draft).

That done, each writer received their own draft back with the original reflection on the draft, the draft, and the comments from a colleague reader. Taking all three together, I asked them to sketch out a plan for revision: based on seeing the comments and reading the other drafts, what do you want to do to your own draft and how will you do it? Then I sent them off for the day. (This process took the entire hour and forty minutes).

On intentionality:
The Bass provoked me in a rather immediate way to ask myself why I'd designed the class as I had. One of my goals is to encourage students to adopt practices that will allow them to re-see, re-envision, their own writing throughout the process of writing a text. I want to have them find a process where they can be doing the writing and be thinking in a meta way about what they are trying to do and why. I want them to feel like they can imagine more than one possible future for each text that they begin. As for reading (and JUST reading) each other's drafts, I wanted them to begin practicing seeing each other's writing as writing - as texts that were worked on (some more than others) and that deserved the time to be read and engaged with. I also wanted to slow down the whole process of feeling like they wrote a text and now there wasn't anything to think about or do until the teacher's comments came back to them on their drafts. I wanted them to begin to take more control over what they wanted their text to be like. 

With the handout, I wanted them to begin to see how they could productively respond to each other in ways that did not fall into correcting or editing, but rather communicated their experience as a reader to the writer (ultimately hoping that they can begin to see their own writing "with the eyes" of a reader. There was something in Bartholomae to this effect, but I'll have to go find that particular reference -- something he wrote that I liked about students coming to understand that their intentions are ultimately not as important as the words they choose to put on the page because readers won't have access to their intentions, only their words.

Pete

Comments

[Mehmet]

Intentionality is a tough question. Considering, as much of our readings have shown, the informality of the environment on practices of teaching and learning, it would not surprise me if teachers do not readily acknowledge where they have gotten their ideas on classroom techniques. As a writing fellow I've discovered that teachers often talk to each other informally and seem to tuck away ideas into their subconcious only to pull them out later without thinking about where they might gotten the ideas in the first place.

[Peter]

I guess I was thinking not so much toward where ideas for what to do in the classroom come from as thinking about why I'm choosing to do what I do in the classroom and being able to articulate to myself and the students there those reasons (and how they fit into some larger trajectory we all are taking)