Composition Studies, The Next Generation: Teaching and Mentoring New Composition Teachers

Introduction

Recently, there has been increased interest in the teaching and mentoring of new composition teachers who will work both at the secondary and university levels, as evidenced by recent publications including Thompson’s Teaching Writing in High School and College: Conversations and Collaborations (NCTE, 2002) and Tremmel and Broz’s Teaching Writing Teachers of High School English and First-Year Composition (Boynton/Cook, 2002). In the last five years, the number of sessions and special interest groups dedicated to the topic at annual conferences and conventions has grown significantly. When we conceived of this special English education issue of The Writing Instructor, we asked the question, how can we most effectively prepare and mentor the teachers who will be teaching composition in the 21st century? We encouraged submissions about collaborations between high school and college teachers of composition or between education and composition faculty, as well as submissions that theorize pedagogical or curricular approaches to teaching and/or mentoring composition teachers. We believe that the teachers and researchers who have contributed articles to this issue and work in various institutional contexts and at various levels of instruction, offer the experience and insight to further the discourse necessary to continually improve composition instruction. Two themes emerged in the context of these articles: the challenges and rewards of using technology in writing instruction and the importance of cross-level researcher and practitioner discourse regarding expectations, practice, and theory in writing instruction. In the context of both themes, the driving questions are similar: How does theory translate into practice? How best to link composition instruction between high school and college?

Beth L. Hewett and Robert Lynn in their article “Training ESOL Instructors and Tutors for Online Conferencing” refer to online instruction as “a hybrid form of communication” which is further complicated by the fact that this communication is with non-native English speakers. Hewett and Lynn specifically address “the fear that two people peering at computer screens will never be able to interact as instructors and students should” by presenting and analyzing case studies of online communications between tutors and students in an ESOL program. The efficacy of online instruction in introducing new concepts and modes of thinking is also addressed by Roy F. Fox and Amy A. Lannin in “Belly Up to the Pond: Teaching Teachers Creative Nonfiction in an Online Class.” Fox and Lannin investigated the ways in which teachers conceive of a new genre, creative nonfiction, in a new venue, online instruction, and present a case study of one teacher’s journey in learning the genre via online conferencing and revision. Finally, Joan Mullin, in “Creating Reflective Teacher-Practitioners in the Midst of Standards” examines one summer program, funded by the state of Ohio to provide quality continuing education for teachers, whose multiple objectives included using technology to teach writing across the disciplines in order to meet state standards.

Several of the articles in this issue focus on encouraging or examining the pedagogical implications of cross-level conversations regarding composition instruction. In “Composition Studies/English Education Connections,” W. Douglas Baker, Elizabeth Brockman, Jonathan Bush, and Kia Jane Richmond explore paradigm shifts in social theory as link between theory and practice, university and secondary school, and Composition Studies and teacher education. In “Notes of a Humbled WPA: Dialogue with High School Colleagues,” Tiane Donahue describes a research project designed to bring together Maine high school and college faculty to systematically exchange information about the high school to college transition in composition instruction. In a year long series of “conversations,” focus groups of both high school and college faculty and first-year college students will share knowledge about theory and practice in a guided setting. Similarly, Joseph Jones surveyed high school English students and teachers to discover what they had to say about the teaching of writing and how their perceptions of college writing did––or didn’t––influence or affect their work. He shares the results of this research in “Muted Voices: High School Teachers, Composition, and the College Imperative.” Mary Godwin also shares an action research project with implications for both high school and undergraduate composition instruction in “Building Triangles: Research and the Realization of Self in Making Sense.” This article, which describes a curriculum designed to improve the research skills of first-year university writers, addresses the challenge of defining a teachable process for directed, undergraduate student research in the composition classroom.

We believe these articles, written by leaders in the field of Composition Studies and English education, open the door for continued discussion between educators at various educational levels and provide models for situating such dialogue. We are pleased to include them in this issue of The Writing Instructor, and we hope to inspire readers with the knowledge and research represented here.

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Composition Studies/English Education Connections

At the 2001 CCCC, a special interest group met for the first time. Jonathan Bush and Janet Alsup were the co-founders of this SIG, and members were primarily English educators who had completed graduate studies in rhetoric and composition; why else would they be attending the C’s? Five years later, the group—currently known as Composition/English Education Connections—has plans to meet at both CCCC and NCTE, and it is still evolving; however, “professional profile” patterns of participants have begun to emerge. SIG members tend to teach writing or literacy-related methods classes for pre-service English teachers, and they often supervise field experiences and/or student teaching for English majors. In addition, they often work with in-service teachers in National Writing Project sites or graduate composition courses. However, SIG members usually combine these English education responsibilities with so-called “straight” composition roles; more specifically, they are often (or in the past have been) affiliated with first-year composition programs, WAC/WID initiatives, or writing centers. Not surprisingly, then, some SIG members teach in English departments, others teach in education departments, and still others have dual placements in both professional settings. Everyone is welcome.

The SIG’s formation coincides with the publication of two significant and closely related texts: Robert Tremmel and William Broz’s Teaching Writing Teachers of High School English and First-Year Composition and a special issue of English Education (volume 31.4 to be precise). To capture Tremmel and Broz’s purpose, Richard Gebhardt explains in the foreword that the book, as a whole, reminds him of the collaboration between Edward P.J. Corbett, arguably one of the most important composition studies scholars in the history of the field, and the Executive Committee of the Ohio Council for Teachers of English Language Arts (OCTELA), whose members are primarily English teachers K-12. Their cooperative and productive work overtwenty-five years ago provides evidence that “seeds of unity” do, in fact, exist among teachers and scholars in both English education and composition studies, but those seeds, as Teaching Writing Teachers attests, have not yet “grown into full flower” (Gebhardt v). The purpose of English Education 34.1 is similar, but Dana L. Fox and Cathy Fleischer employ a different metaphor, border crossing:

In our professional lives as English educators, our work with preservice and practicing teachers takes us across a number of traditional education boundaries, both literal and figurative. For example, we travel back and forth between the physical sites of the university and school communities we inhabit daily, or we move across department and disciplinary boundaries within the university setting. In these border-crossings (sometimes smooth and seamless, other times rocky and uncomfortable), we negotiate among various discourse communities and cultural norms and expectations. While some of the boundaries we encounter seem natural and useful, others seem to be artificial and contrived distinctions. (3)

This roundtable attempts to continue the conversation, in the Burkean Parlor metaphor sense of the word. The co-authors happen to be SIG members, and they represent a cross-section of the group. W. Douglas Baker teaches undergraduate and graduate writing methods and theory courses at Eastern Michigan University. Along with Heidi Estrem, he is co-chair of the Conference on English Education’s commission on Writing Teacher Education, a group that is working to build contact and community across all writing teacher education. Elizabeth Brockman, the current co-chair of the Composition/English Education SIG, is a former secondary-level English teacher who currently teaches a composition methods course for pre-service English teachers at Central Michigan University, where she also supervises a field experience program and student teaching. In fall 2005, she began a three-year tenure as the new director of composition, a role she has served in the past on an interim basis. Kia Jane Richmond teaches the writing methods course at Northern Michigan University, where she also supervises student teachers with English majors. She is also chair of the Conference of English Education commission on English education coursework. Jonathan Bush teaches composition methods courses at Western Michigan University and is also a co-director of a writing project. He also coordinates an intensive in-service writing teacher education experience for current teachers each summer. Like many SIG members, Jonathan Bush, Elizabeth Brockman, and Kia Jane Richmond all emerged from composition and rhetoric graduate programs. In contrast, W. Douglas Baker’s background is not in composition studies but in education with an emphasis on writing and literacy.

To create this roundtable, the co-authors explored several different composition-related questions and topics, but in the end two issues emerged as crucial: (1) What theory from composition studies do you believe is important to include in classes for future elementary and/or secondary writing teachers? (2) What are the knowledge, background, traits, and abilities of a successful writing teacher and/or writing methods faculty member? To answer these questions, each co-author created his/her own responses, and then a combined works cited page was assembled.

Question #1: What theory from Composition Studies is important to include in classes for future elementary and/or secondary writing teachers? How does this relate to the preparation of college-level composition instructors?

Elizabeth Brockman

In my composition methods classes, I always assign Maxine Hairston’s “The Winds of Change,” so all of my students learn Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts. As Hairston makes clear, Kuhn’s theory is grounded in science, but it’s transportable to other disciplines/arenas, and so for clarification purposes, we initially explore paradigm shifts of large-scale social issues: women in the workforce, marriages for bi-racial/homosexual couples, and even earrings for men are three good examples. In each case, students can easily describe the old/new paradigms governing social behavior, and they can talk with authority about the unstable transition period, citing specific examples of often painful disagreement and unrest at the national level and in their personal lives, as different parties vie for stability or change. It’s productive, too, to debate whether students believe the paradigm shift in any of these social cases is complete, and equally important, what evidence they cite to support their views. Interestingly, students seldom agree on this topic, which reinforces Kuhn’s theory that paradigm shifts are anything but smooth, steady, or linear.

Next, I remind my classes that paradigm shifts need not represent solely national trends; they can also be local phenomena. Still focusing on social themes but in a single school setting, I mention that the student body in my most recent high school position was in the midst of a small-scale paradigm shift over—of all things—the value of wearing letter jackets. In previous decades, a letter jacket had apparently been a status symbol representing prowess and machismo, just as it is, for example, in Happy Days or American Graffiti; that model, however, was changing, and the transition period was fraught with tension and angst, just as Kuhn’s theory would suggest. Those clinging to the old model—that is, athletes who continued to wear their letter jackets with pride—were not in physical danger, but they did pay a social price for their school spirit. In hallway and cafeteria encounters, they were often the objects of mockery, scorn, and derision by peer athletes who embraced the new model: that wearing letter jackets was naive, unsophisticated, and generally un-cool. As Timothy Lensmire has shown, informal social hierarchies are real and powerful forces in school culture, so Kuhn’s theory applies to even something as seemingly insignificant and informal as letter jackets.

Eventually, my methods students and I return to the field of composition and focus squarely on Hairston’s observations, walking our way through Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures, 70s open admissions policies, graduate composition programs, and so forth, which Hairston cites as concrete signs of instability and change. This information is all new to my students. Then we compare the old paradigm with the new: the so-called current-traditional paradigm of teaching writing to the then-emerging process model. Though unfamiliar with Kuhn’s theory and Hairston’s signs of instability/change, my students are well versed in the traditional vs. writing-as-a-process debates, so this comparison is “old hat” to them. In the Introduction to Taking Stock: The Writing Process Movement in the 90’s, Lad Tobin has indicated, however, that the field has perhaps too easily dismissed traditionalists by unfairly constructing them all as old fogies, fuddy-duddies, or even villains (5), so I momentarily (and cautiously!) encourage students to sympathize with those embracing the old paradigm—any old paradigm—by asking them to put themselves in their shoes. More specifically, I ask them to imagine their reaction if in thirty years or so, after they had spent a lifetime teaching, a new group of teachers and theorists claimed literacy circles or scoring rubrics (or any method/value my students would currently defend to the hilt) were ineffective or even hurtful to students. Would they roll over and embrace the new paradigm, or would they resist, holding tightly to the old method/value that they had been using their entire career? And just how high are the professional stakes for either choice?

Having answered these questions, my students begin to see why paradigm shifts take place so slowly and cantankerously; equally important, they understand how it’s possible (nearly fifty years after Dartmouth) to have both traditional and writing-as-a-process teachers “out there,” sometimes working within the sameschool districts and departments. Not surprisingly, then, my students wonder if the paradigm shift Hairston heralded is complete or not, and I tell them it’s an intriguing question, rendered even more so by 1990s post-process critiques of the process movement:

But like rock music, free love, political protests, and other trends that flourished in the late 60s, the writing process movement has begun to get squeezed by the past and the future, by the right and the left. The critique from traditionalists, including many administrators, teachers, and parents, was expected . . . [but] somewhere along the line, the followers of Murray, Macrorie, Macrimmon, and Moffet, still struggling to convince the establishment, somehow became the establishment. And to their surprise and horror, they suddenly found themselves exposed on their left flank (the military metaphors unfortunately seem to fit the spirit of the debate). (Tobin 5)

And so the winds of change blow—again.

Maxine Hairston’s “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing” is a landmark essay in the field of composition, and it does a fine job of introducing methods students to Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts. Without this theory, students are likely to describe educational trends as the general public does: a pendulum swinging slowly, steadily, smoothly, and surely back and forth (back and forth, back and forth) and in only two directions. Kuhn helps students call into question this overly simplistic metaphor, and it also helps them to understand why even important pedagogical change happens so slowly, and often painfully.

Jonathan Bush

This is an important question that I struggle with on a regular basis. How much theory do I bring into my composition methods classroom? On one hand, if I do too much theory, I run the risk of having my students tune me out as they turn to other places to seek “hands-on” practice of their craft. On the other hand, I risk, by underselling theory, the possibility of passing on a notion that teaching is atheoretical—and relies on tricks and gimmicks, rather than an understanding of purpose or goals, to develop pedagogy. In each case, there would be vast negative consequences for my students’ future teaching careers.

I see my goal as a writing teacher educator, particularly when dealing with undergraduate teacher education candidates, as one of developing commitment, confidence, and competence in these future teachers. This deeply influences how I approach composition theory in this context. This theory is a tool for us as a community of teachers to think about our practices, develop ideals that support and guide those practices, and then evaluate how we have met or missed those pedagogical goals.

I always begin this sort of course by focusing on the commitment aspect of teaching composition. Many of my students have come to English language arts because of their self-described love of literature. Many of them define themselves as being literature teachers. Often, because of the ways many of them (although not all) have been taught writing in their past—primarily in a current-traditional mode that emphasizes formula over invention, and teacher-directed text over real audiences and purposes—many of my students come to the class seeing writing as a chore, something to dealt with, but not enjoyed on the journey to teaching literary texts. My first goal, then, is to use theory and practice to break down this concept and create excitement about teaching writing. I want students to realize that writing can be an enjoyable, yet rigorous, act. I begin this process by introducing the concept of best practices in writing as described by Stephen Zemelman, Harvey Daniels, and Arthur Hyde in Best Practice: New Standards for Teaching and Learning in America’s Schools. This text summarizes composition practice into short, bullet-like statements with explanations and discussion that describe the general ideals that many writing teachers believe describe good composition instruction. These statements, while skirting controversies that span across composition studies, include, among others

• All children can and should write.
• Grammar is best learned in the context of actual writing.
• Teachers can help students get started writing.
• Teachers must support students as they write.
• Students should write for real audiences and real purposes.

These statements give my students something to grasp, so they can also say, “The five-paragraph essay from my high school class WAS bad teaching after all.” It opens the door to deeper understanding of the core issues of teaching writing and allows for further exploration. Does this mean that best practice is enough for teachers to know? Absolutely not. Rather, these truths are used to provide a base for later explorations into composition theory; without that base as a springboard from commitment into competence and confidence, however, students tend not to appreciate composition work.

Once this initial commitment phase is completed, I bring in some composition theory to complicate my students’ evolving beliefs about teaching. In particular, I introduce them to various traditions of teaching writing—the expressive, cognitive, socio-epistemic, neo-rhetorical—and then ask them to identify themselves within those approaches as we learn about methods associated with each. When we look at issues of revision, for example, I might ask students to consider how an expressive approach to revision may look in comparison to one from a critical/social perspective. Likewise, I ask students to consider the writing process from a cognitive and a neo-rhetorical perspective. As students articulate a greater awareness of their own beliefs and conceptions of “best practice,” I ask them to take a stance and declare their own philosophy of teaching writing, both in terms of the best practice ideals and traditions of composition studies that complicate those ideals. By doing this, I try to place theory into the appropriate context as these new teachers begin to come to terms with their own history as writers and their developing knowledge as teachers of writing.

Kia Jane Richmond

I introduce my students to C.H. Knoblauch’s four philosophies of composition, as they are defined in his College English article, “Rhetorical Constructions: Dialogue and Commitment.” Doing so helps students to analyze their own educational experiences with writing, as well as to examine various trends in composition instruction in the public schools. We discuss Knoblauch’s philosophies (defined as ontological, objectivist, expressivist, and sociological/dialogical), and then attempt to classify teachers we have observed during field experiences or authors we’ve read for the course (i.e., Nancie Atwell, Peter Elbow, and Mary Erhenworth). Reflecting on how beliefs are connected to one’s actions in the classroom is an important part of making the transition from student to teacher.
As Dick Fulkerson argues in “Four Philosophies of Composition,” it is also important to match assessment to one’s philosophy of teaching writing; therefore, I also ask students to consider what types of evaluation would be used by teachers who fall into each of Knoblauch’s categories. What kind of assessment strategies are used by a teacher who believes that writing involves personal voice, creativity, expression, and collaboration (expressivist)? How would the classroom of a teacher who sees writing as experimental and tied to correctness or standards (objectivist) set up a portfolio system of evaluation? By inviting our English education students to examine how writing is taught (and evaluated), we are apt to produce strong writing teachers who will in turn help their students to be more critically informed and reflective.

As a group of writing teacher educators, we value connecting students to the rich history of composition studies. Whether it is using an overview approach or a specific examination of one epistemological position, each of us works to invite students to view writing not as a stagnant set of skills that can be taught but as an academic discipline, one that is fluid and tied as much to practitioners’ beliefs as to its situatedness within the larger context of English Studies.

The connection between theory and practice seems to be both overt and imperceptible. Jonathan, Elizabeth, Doug, and I encourage students to examine the practices of real teachers and writers, including ourselves. Traversing back and forth between teacher and theory, talking or writing about why they think writing teachers do what they do, our students are invited to be active participants in their own learning and to develop (or identify) their own reason for writing (or teaching) from one position or another. By giving students the opportunity to examine “the assumptions, biases, fears, fantasies, literacies, values, and political beliefs they are bringing with them to their teaching” (Tobin, Reading Student Writing 137–8), we are setting up our classrooms as sites of both reflection and action. This invitational approach to dialogue and self-knowledge seems to support the way that Lad Tobin defines teaching: as “a way of reading and writing” (129). Tobin goes on to say, “Students learn to teach through, first, learning to read the classroom and, second, learning to write themselves within that classroom.” Our students, by responding to and discussing theories of composing, and by observing and analyzing best practices, are enacting the concept of teaching as an act of such reading and writing.

W. Douglas Baker

I strive to make visible to student-teachers representative theories of writing and the underlying assumptions and implications for what becomes available for students to learn. However, these student-teachers face three main tasks that make it essential that we provide tools for guide them.

First, pre-service teachers (our students) spend huge amounts of time visiting classrooms and observing instruction, or at least watching the interactions among class members, and they read about and discuss the practices and conceptual frameworks of model writing teachers (found in, for example, Nancie Atwell’s In the Middle or Katie Wood Ray & Lester L. Larminack’s The Writing Workshop); providing a framework of multiple lenses for these observations and interactions becomes a tool to inform how they understand what is revealed to them through classrooms and texts. Second, pre-service teachers are often encouraged simultaneously to examine their experiences and processes as writers in classrooms and to teach implicit instructional frameworks and conceptual models. A concluding objective is for these student-teachers to weave all of this information into beliefs that form theoretical underpinnings of cohesive, planned curricula that demonstrate alignment to theories reflected in them and to the presumed needs of their students. A tall order for inexperienced teachers—for any teacher.

As English educators, we are interested in how pre-service teachers plan, organize, and design activities of proposed curricula because these actions will presumably drive what their students have access to for learning. However, I find that these objectives for our students are challenging for us as teachers and for them. As a teacher, I model instruction, analyze and discuss representative strategies of writers and writing teachers, seek to develop in the students a conscious awareness of their choices as writers, and encourage them to reflect on their processes as writers and teachers. As students, they listen to a teacher reveal his/her pedagogy, maybe for the first time, they read about in texts and engage in some of the strategies of writers and of writing teachers, they observe and informally interview teachers, and they participate in classroom discussions in their quests to develop as writers and teachers.

Part of revealing choices that I make as a writing teacher demands that I provide a rationale for pedagogical beliefs and practices, but embedded dilemmas rise to reveal some of the complexities of teaching writing. For example, similar to Donald Murray (in A Writer Teaches Writing Revised), Peter Elbow (in Writing without Teachers), and Nancie Atwell (in In the Middle) among other writing teachers, I position students as writers and encourage them to write from their experiences, e.g., personal narrative, a genre that lends to an expressivist approach, or the sociological/dialogical since the composing will be personal and informed by the interactions with others (and their own personal contexts). As writers, student-teachers may wonder, “What is a personal narrative? What should I choose to reveal to my peers? Do I have to tell the whole truth? What if I want to change something? How long does it have to be?” However, I also position student-teachers as writing teachers, and so other questions may be raised from this perspective. For example, what counts as a personal narrative? What if a student feels constrained by writing from his or her personal experiences? How should I respond to their experiences, especially if they are really personal?

In order to guide the student-teachers to answer these questions from the different perspectives, I believe that it is essential to invite them into the conversations of assessment. As the field of composition studies generally agrees, assessment practices should be aligned with the teacher’s conceptual framework for teaching writing. By examining questions of assessment from the perspectives of writers and teachers, student-teachers may begin to change conceptually how they view an idea or action (such as writing personal narratives) and, subsequently, reconstruct their beliefs that lead them to consciously develop and align classroom practices, ones that meet the needs of their students. Of course, one of the dilemmas of this conceptual change process is that despite all of their efforts in a writing pedagogy class, beginning teachers seek unequivocal methods that they can implement during their student teaching. But an understanding of how to apply informing frameworks evolves over time, and that is why teaching writing is a career.

Question #2: What are the knowledge, background, traits, and abilities of a successful writing teacher and/or composition methods professor? What should he/she know, believe, and be able to do?

Jonathan Bush

On the first day of my teaching writing course, I usually ask my students to describe the perfect writing teacher. We then turn this into a somewhat silly activity where small groups of students use crafts (yarn, construction paper, markers, etc.) to construct an image of this teacher, with labels and background. Some groups always seem to take the contrary route and mine some negative experiences to create a villainous teacher of writing. After they present, I leave the room for 5–7 minutes and ask the class to create a list of dos and don’ts for writing teachers. The lists tend to be remarkably accurate in terms of the concepts I like to teach. My most recent class created the following lists:

Do Give one-on-one feedback Give constructive criticism Provide rubrics Build relationships Be positive but critical Encourage individuality/respect difference Be flexible Allow revisions Create relevant assignments, with real purposes and real audiences Provide choices Be available Return papers quickly Leave room for creativity Teach grammar in context

Don’t Waste time with busywork Make writing an “exercise” or a formula Have a red pen mentality Emphasize grammar over communication Humiliate students Single out students Use writing as punishment Become a dictator Prejudge Do the same thing over and over again Expect perfect papers

When I return, my students and I go though their lists, and I describe my expectations for our course. In particular, I describe my goals of helping them use the course to become committed to the concept of teaching writing, competent in the theories and practices that guide writing teachers and exemplify best practice in writing, and experienced in applying and using those theories and practices. Within the construct of the course, and its limited opportunity for field experiences (usually a one-week project in a local middle or high school at the end of the course), I see my course as a stepping-stone towards my ultimate goal of creating a generation of committed, competent, and experienced teachers of writing.

This list I show above, with minor changes, is essentially replicated each time I teach a new section of this course, or I interact with students unschooled in composition theory and practice who are studying to become teachers. What it tends to show is that the concepts we teach in composition theory are not foreign ideas, or ones that run counter to intuition. Rather, what we do, as writing teacher educators, is build on those ideas—ones that are already in our students’ memories from their own experiences—and give them names, theories, and practical implications.

For example, I see my course as an introductory experience in which I break down students’ previous perceptions of teaching writing, show the possibilities that exist (as well as the theories that back those practices), and give students an opportunity to practice their craft in a assisted, controlled, supportive environment. The full process cannot become complete until afterward, when my students have made the full transition from student to teacher. I engage them in the concepts and practices of the field of composition and work to help them engage with these ideals, and, most importantly, commit to these concepts, no matter the roadblocks they may find in their schools to putting them into practice.

Referring to my responses to question #1, a good beginning for this process of intellectual maturation is the Best Practice series (Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde); once my students begin to understand that their ideas are within the overall guiding concepts of our field, then we can begin to take those ideas, and break them apart, critique, and develop them by reading, developing, and considering composition theories not as another concept, but as a reasonable follow-up of finding out more about what we already know.

One of the benefits of being in my current position for several years now is that I am beginning to see how this project I have taken on is beginning to turn out. My first students are now in their third and fourth years of teaching. Some of my former students have become best practice teachers who teach to our “dos” and live up to their expectations and our concepts. I see them at writing project programs, at conferences, and at in-services. I also get e-mails with questions (and sometimes advice for me, telling about situations they’ve come across in their teaching). Much like the popular circular metaphor of the writing process I advance, they all know that they, like their students’ drafts, are never a truly finished product. This trait is clearly the most important one that they have developed about teaching writing.

Kia Jane Richmond

I believe one of the best qualities a writing teacher can have is a solid understanding of oneself and a desire to know students as individuals. I use two theories from psychology to help my writing students (and future teachers of writing) to develop this kind of self-awareness: personality theory (a la Myers Briggs) and Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences. I introduce these theories into my classes and ask students to use their IBM ThinkPads to search online for any number of web sites that offer the opportunity to complete an inventory based on the Myers-Briggs personality indicator and the multiple intelligences. Students reflect on themselves as writers, students, and teachers in a first assignment designed to give them self-knowledge and to give me a glimpse into their personalities and preferences. They are asked to consider questions such as these: How does being an “extraverted-feeling type” influence your choices as a writer, peer response partner, or teacher of writing? How does knowing that you are drawn to “kinesthetic knowing” find its way into your preferences for revision or responding?

Examining our motivations and our preferences helps us have information we can use during the writing (or lesson planning) process. Multiple intelligence theory, for instance, encourages us to view all individuals as gifted and talented. Each of us has strengths, intelligences as Howard Gardner calls them, and each of us interacts with our world from different perspectives. I myself am highly linguistic, spatial, and musical. This affects the way I prewrite, the way I organize my thoughts in drafts, the way my voice comes across on the page. Getting a student to identify his or her own strengths allows me to translate assignments for an individual’s preferences. I can help the student who is logical/mathematical to use outlines, lists, or flowcharts in prewriting. I can show the strongly intrapersonal learner how to use journaling or freewriting to help them through difficult periods of revision.

Teaching writing can be a difficult undertaking. By using strategies that help students to become more self-aware, we can make that process more meaningful and less intimidating. Taking this approach also does something else: it allows us to define the teaching of writing as a social act, as an interpersonal interaction. In Reading Student Writing: Confessions, Meditations, and Rants, Lad Tobin writes that he changed his teaching methods after taking a graduate class with Donald Murray and then doing some serious contemplation on the works of scholars, such as Elbow, Bartholomae, and Sommers. He says, “From the moment I started reading drafts for potential rather than for assessment, my relationship to my students and my sense of self as a writing teacher changed in fundamental and exhilarating ways” (11).

In a way, I am reading my students for potential. What gifts do they have to bring to the community of teachers or writers in my classroom? What preferences or talents do they have that will influence the way they choose to write or teach composition? Identifying our strengths (and shortcomings) allows us to enter into the act of writing or teaching as makers of knowledge. By viewing students as knowers, we position them as active participants in their own learning. Teaching writing involves a relationship between writer and reader, between teacher and student, between writer and peer response partner. Developing a better understanding of ourselves in these and other roles helps us read our students and our classroom more effectively. Effective teaching of writing, then, includes an invitation to self-actualization. Bringing in psychological theories can help a writing teacher to encourage individual as well as community growth in the classroom.

W. Douglas Baker

To answer this question, we first need to discuss what constitutes “successful” or “effective” writing instructors. On one hand, teachers are presumably evaluated through the actions of their students: if students improve as writers, the teacher must be offering instruction that at least partly engineered the change. (Of course, how to measure students’ progress is debatable.) On the other hand, to judge a teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom, we often rely on anecdotal information, student testimonies or evaluations, and peer or administrator observations. How teachers discuss their pedagogy among their peers, or present ideas, further reveals their philosophical beliefs about writing and selected classroom practices, and these public displays invite comparisons with literature of the field and the beliefs and practices of their peers. Therefore, the success of writing teachers is judged through evaluation of student writing, anecdotal information and testimonies, and their public discourse.

The National Writing Project and many composition and English education Education scholars believe that writing teachers should position and engage their students as writers: people who invent topics, select appropriate genres for the intended audiences, and struggle to craft words for the chosen purposes, especially when that purpose is to communicate or think through an idea. Most importantly, writing teachers should write. These beliefs have roots in research that sought to understand the composing processes of writers and how to integrate the information in classrooms, e.g., Janet Emig’s groundbreaking work on the composing processes of a group of senior high school students. By engaging as writers, students will learn how to compose in selected genres for particular purposes, and through response by the teacher or their peers, they will talk as writers within a community; by writing, teachers can learn more about their own composing processes, link that information with existing scholarship, and plan curriculum that will provide opportunities for students to practice as writers and examine the elements and processes of writing. Through these actions, it is presumed that teachers will construct theoretical frameworks and align classroom practices for chosen objectives.

Constructing metaphors of writing instruction is part of designing a framework and explaining how instructional activities are aligned. For example, teachers might view learning to write as a journey and interpret their role as a guide, or writing could be understood to be performance and teachers act as coaches. These metaphors imply particular actions (e.g., a coach understands that repetition is important and that students need to try actions without constant correction). Writing teachers must be able to apply the metaphor and their knowledge to local contexts and their students’ developmental levels. For example, I recently observed an elementary school teacher instruct her students (a first-second grade combination class) on writing letters to their parents, specifically on how to choose an interesting and appropriate greeting. One of the first graders is capable of selecting from a range of possibilities and writing a letter that showed her ability to explain and describe actions from the week. She had also drafted and illustrated a few “books” (each told the story of an event or incident), which were made from quarter sheets of paper and stapled together. However, another student struggled to jot down more than a brief greeting in his letter; yet, according to the teacher, the student is capable of orally describing and explaining details of his stories. Therefore, the teacher must address the different developmental stages of these students as writers by encouraging their composing processes while introducing next steps.

Successful writing teachers have usually experienced an epiphany as a writer, and these discoveries inform their instruction. Nancie Atwell and Donald Graves, among others teacher-scholars, offer insights to their composing processes and experiences as writers that informed their teaching. By struggling as writers, teachers of writing are more prepared to coach or guide students’ efforts as writers. For example, one of my students stated, “I hate writing, although I’ve done a lot of it in school.” I too remember the feeling of writing for school, instead of writing for myself. As I learned to see the choice within the parameters of assignments, I changed as a writer. Hopefully, I will be able to guide this student to see writing as an opportunity to explore, reflect on, or discover an idea. Furthermore, by demonstrating responses as one of her readers, I plan to invite her into the conversations and practices of writers, which include struggle and uncertainty.

Writing teachers should exemplify patience and curiosity as a reader of student writing. They should observe, listen, and raise questions. By approaching a student’s text as an interested reader, a teacher will be able to provide insights from the perspective of one experienced reader. And then the teacher can initiate and model discussions that may lead to revisions of the writing. Yet, becoming an experienced reader and coach of student writing requires that teachers continue to study. With the rise of potential online writing opportunities for students, teachers must learn about emerging genres and experiment with them. Teachers should read texts that represent a range of genres, purposes, and styles. For example, one of my students has expressed interest in writing a graphic novel, and I am developing a more informed perspective of that genre. Writing teachers do not need to be expert writers in all genres, but they should grow in their understanding of them in order to make them available to students. Years ago, I learned that I am not a poet, but I write poems periodically and struggle as a poet; and I offer my students opportunities to write poetry.

Finally, writing teachers should believe that writing is a craft, that their students have experiences to draw on as writers, and that students can improve as writers; writing is not a skill granted through grace to the gifted and talented. Students want to communicate their stories, their perspectives on topics, and contribute to conversations that matter to them. One of the professional and ethical responsibilities of teachers is to guide students to expand their understanding of topics that influence them and to show them how to participate within those conversations. Classroom writing provides avenues for learning how to contribute to change, and successful writing teachers welcome students into the conversations and show them how to make a difference.

Elizabeth Brockman

During the 2004–05 school year, I have had the pleasure of working with three unusual MA candidates: Margaret Fedder-Hauke, Laura Grow, and Mary Rosalez. Margaret, Laura, and Mary all boast 7–12 teaching credentials, but none is currently a middle/high school teacher; instead, they are all full-time students with graduate assistantships in the English Department at Central Michigan University. As graduate assistants, they completed a required practicum to teach ENG 101 and are fully responsible for two sections each semester. They do the planning and teaching, they post and hold office hours, and they calculate and submit grades. Additionally, they share offices with other graduate assistants sans teaching credentials, take a full course load each semester, and generally live a live apart from their secondary-level counterparts. After graduation, Margaret, Laura, and Mary will face three obvious, and potentially overlapping, career choices: return to public schools, explore community colleges, or—most relevant here—pursue PhD work in the hope of landing a tenure track position in English education. Not surprisingly, this last option has prompted many spirited conversations, and our echoing themes showcase the qualities and characteristics that composition methods faculty might or should possess.

What makes Margaret, Laura, and Mary outstanding candidates, however, is that they have combined credentials in English education and first-year composition. As undergraduates, the three women enrolled in teacher education programs and completed all state certification requirements, including coursework, field experiences, and student teaching. In the process, they read composition scholarship, such as Atwell’s In the Middle, Burke’s The English Teacher’s Companion, and Dale’s Co-Authoring in the Classroom (as representative examples) designed specifically for writing teachers 7–12. In short, the women were Making the Journey (Monseau) and Composing a Teaching Life (Vinz) by planning careers in secondary-level education. As graduate assistants, Margaret, Laura, and Mary have reinforced and extended their knowledge of composition pedagogy by studying first-year composition texts: Harris’ A Teaching Subject, Clark’s Concepts in Composition, and Good & Warshauer’s In Our Own Voices, as well as a course pack with readings that range from Peter Elbow to David Bartholomae. In addition, the women have received instruction and practice regarding writing assignments, responding techniques, scoring rubrics, and grade calibrations, and they have analyzed features of effective course readings, class discussions, and one-on-one conferences. No one would deny that Margaret, Laura, and Mary are not currently qualified for composition methods positions; they would be wise to complete at least two or three years in classrooms 7–12, and they need further graduate work in literacy studies or rhetoric and composition with the requisite PhD in English or Education. I still contend, however, that Margaret, Laura, and Mary have taken an important first step by combining English education with first-year composition.

And Robert Tremmel would agree. In his provocative essay, “Seeking a Balanced Discipline: Writing Teacher Education in First-Year Composition and English Education,” Tremmel claims that though English educators and WPAs inhabit different university spheres, they share the same goal: teaching teachers how to teach writing. Moreover, he claims the two roles and corresponding fields are so historically and currently similar that “writing methods [should be] an emerging discipline in its own right” (6):

I think it makes sense to open negotiations on how we might re-route and re-grade [our] common path[s], starting with serious discussion about what life would be like if we were to remove some of the impediments that keep us apart. Writing teacher education for secondary teachers should not be a completely separate enterprise from writing teacher education for first-year composition. The writing curriculum should not be severed between grade 12 and grade 13. (24)

Given university politics, disciplinary biases, and even “essential differences” (Alsup 33) between English Education and composition studies, it’s difficult to predict if Tremmel’s vision will come to fruition; however, his basic premise—that student writers would benefit from stronger “grade 12 and grade 13” connections—is relevant here because Margaret, Laura, and Mary are the kind of new professionals who could one day help build them. As ENG 101 graduate assistants, they have direct knowledge of the methods, theories, and materials associated with first-year composition. If they graduate and return to pubic schools, the women will bring with them a fuller and more nuanced understanding of university writing conventions, and this understanding will enliven and enrich not only their daily teaching in classrooms 7–12, but also their professional dialogue at the department and district levels. Imagine, too, the potential contribution at state and national conferences.

This same understanding, however, will also enliven and enrich their professional lives if Margaret, Laura, and Mary pursue PhD work leading to English education positions. With dual credentials in English education and first-year composition, they would more likely teach composition methods classes with built-in and productive contact zones, as Janet Alsup defines them in “Seeking Connections: An English Educator Speaks across a Disciplinary Contact Zone.” Imagine, for example, a course where composition methods students read Nancie Atwell and Nancy Sommers, where they ache with caring (like Mem Fox) and eat like owls (like Wendy Bishop), and where they critique both No Child Left Behind and University Written Competency Standards. These formerly incongruent possibilities are endless, and for now, just that: possibilities. My ruminations suggest that, like Peter Smagorinsky and Melissa E. Whiting in How Writing Teachers Get Taught, my “purpose is not to have the final word . . . but rather to provide some grounds for . . . a healthy, spirited, and necessary professional conversation” (3–4). And because the overarching purpose of this conversation is to open doors and not close them, to be inclusive and not contentious, our dialogue must include the venerable contributions of English educators whose graduate work didn’t—or, because of impenetrable borders and boundaries, couldn’t—include access to a first-year composition program.

Conclusion

In May 1977, Janet Emig published her landmark CCC article entitled “Writing as a Mode of Learning.” In that same important CCC issue, Richard Gebhardt published a lesser known essay entitled “Balancing Theory with Practice in the Training of Writing Teachers.” His basic claim is that new writing teachers need four essential kinds of knowledge: (1) structure/history of language, (2) understanding of rhetoric, (3) a theoretical framework regarding writing, and (4) awareness of good methods. Even more relevant than these claims, however, is Gebhardt’s inclusive conception of “new writing teacher.” He defines that term as “students preparing to teach writing in public school or college” (134). In short, Gebhardt makes no distinction between pre-service English teachers and new ENG 101 graduate assistants.

Thirty years later, Richard Gebhardt continues to be a powerful force in writing teacher education, and he is, not surprisingly, a member of the previously mentioned Composition/English Education Connection SIG. Here is the CCCC abstract for his 2006 SIG talk, entitled “Seeking Crossovers in Writing-Teacher Courses”:

When the same faculty members teach courses for future language arts teachers and new graduate students, they are in a particularly good spot to advance broad goals of writing-teacher education as an enterprise that cuts across traditional divides (high school from college, for example). They can and they should do this by deliberately seeking points of cross-over in their teaching. They can do this, for instance, by having composition grad students consider research about young writers and read in writing methods texts used by undergraduate language arts majors. They can do it, too, by foregrounding in their undergraduate methods courses the research and theoretical roots of recommended teaching strategies. Those are just examples. This SIG segment would illustrate a point and then invite interested people to develop a list of productive crossovers that could be pursued in introductory writing-teacher courses for language arts undergraduates and composition graduate students.

Gebhardt’s pedagogical goals are both substantive and innovative. However, as this Writing Instructor roundtable suggests (and as Gebhardt would surely agree), English educators needn’t be WPAs to find crossovers between their writing methods classes and composition studies. All they need is open space and a little innovation in their course syllabi and lesson plans. In other words, composition scholarship may be the most accessible crossover of all. As this article tries to demonstrate, it is possible and productive to assign Janet Emig, C.H. Knoblauch, Maxine Hairston, and Peter Elbow (to name just a few) to pre-service teachers, along with Nancie Atwell, Harvey Daniels, and Katie Ray Wood. As Gebhardt has claimed, this kind of crossover “makes it more likely that academics specializing in “composition” and “English education” can better understand each other’s work and cooperate in the important task of preparing writing teachers” (Foreword viii).

Works Cited

Alsup, Janet. “Seeking Connection: An English Educator Speaks across a Disciplinary ‘Contact Zone.’” English Education 34.1 (October 2001): 31–49.

Atwell, Nancie. In the Middle: New Understandings about Writing, Reading, and Learning, 2 nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1998.

—. Lessons That Change Writers. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2002.

Bishop, Wendy. Acts of Revision: A Guide for Writers. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2004.

Burke, Jim. The English Teacher’s Companion: Complete Guide to Classroom, Curriculum, and the Profession. 2 nd ed. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003.

Clark, Irene. Concepts in Composition: Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003.

Chomsky, Noam. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton, 1957. Reprint. Berlin and New York, 1985.

Dale, Helen. Co-Authoring in the Classroom: Creating an Environment for Effective Collaboration. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1997.

Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 1998.

Emig, Janet. The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1971.

Ehrenworth, Mary. Looking to Write: Students Writing through the Visual Arts. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003.

Fox, Dana L., and Cathy Fleischer. “Teaching and Writing across Traditional Boundaries in English Education.” English Education 34.1 (October 2001): 3–5.

Fox, Mem. Radical Reflections: Passionate Opinions on Teaching, Learning and Living. Orlando: Harcourt, 1993.

Fulkerson, Dick. “Four Philosophies of Composition.” CCC 30.4 (December 1979): 343–48.

Gardner, Howard. Intelligences Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21 st Century. Philadelphia, PA:Basic Books, 2000.

Gebhardt, Richard. “Balancing Theory with Practice in the Training of Writing Teachers.” CCC 28.2 (May 1977): 134–40.

—. “Foreword.” In Teaching Writing Teachers of High School English and First-Year Composition, ed. Robert Tremmel and William Broz, v-viii. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2002.

—. “Seeking Crossovers in Writing-Teacher Courses.” Unpublished presentation at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Chicago, IL, March 2006.

Good, Tina Lavonne, and Leanne B. Warshauer’s In Our Own Voices: Graduate Students Teach Writing. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000.

Hairston, Maxine. “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing.” CCC 33.1 (February 1982): 76–88.

Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966.Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.

Knoblauch, C.H. “Rhetorical Constructions: Dialogue and Commitment.” College English 50.2 (February 1988): 125–40.

Lensmire, Timothy J. When Children Write: Critical Re-Visions of the Writing Workshop. New York, NY: Columbia University Teachers College Press, 1993.

Monseau, Virginia. Making the Journey: Being and Becoming a Teacher of English Language Arts, 2 nd edition. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2000.

Murray, Donald. A Writer Teaches Writing Revised. Boston: Heinle, 2004.

Ray, Katie Wood, and Lester L. Laminack. The Writing Workshop: Working through the Hard Parts (and They’re All Hard Parts). Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2001.

Smagorinsky, Peter, and Melissa E. Whiting. How English Teachers Get Taught: Methods of Teaching the Methods Class. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1995.

Tobin, Lad. “Introduction: How the Writing Process Was Born—and Other Conversion Narratives.” Taking Stock: The Writing Process Movement in the 90s. Ed. Lad Tobin and Thomas Newkirk. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1994. 1–14.

—. Reading Student Writing: Confessions, Meditations, and Rants. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2004.

Tremmel. Robert. “Seeking a Balanced Discipline: Writing Teacher Education in First-Year Composition and English Education.” English Education 34.1 (October 2001): 6–30.

Tremmel, Robert, and William Broz, eds. Teaching Writing Teachers of High School English and First-Year Composition. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2002.

Vinz, Ruth. Composing a Teaching Life. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1996.

Zemelman, Steven, Harvey Daniels, and Arthur Hyde. Best Practice: New Standards for Teaching and Learning in America’s Schools. 2 nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1998.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Notes of a Humbled WPA: Dialogue with High School Colleagues

Introduction

In the 1970s, as I completed my undergraduate degree in English education at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, I worked at Copley Square High School as a student teacher. One of my practice teaching classes, under the guidance of senior teacher Steve Gordon, was the college preparatory writing course for seniors. I had already worked in the Northeastern University Writing Center as an undergraduate tutor, and had colleagues teaching first-year composition there. I was able to bring seniors from Copley Square High to visit the first-year writing courses at Northeastern. I hoped instinctively at the time that exposure to college classes would first inspire the students to attend college and then ease their transition from high school to college. I felt privileged to be simultaneously in the high school classroom and close to the college writing classroom. My career took other paths and I ended up a university teacher, but I hear echoes of my first teaching experiences more and more frequently.

Twenty-five years later, as WPA at the selective University of Maine-Farmington, a public liberal arts institution with a well known College of Education, I have felt personal frustration with my college students’ claims about what they never did in high school. I find a dearth of available information about how students experience the high school-to-college transition in the writing classroom. I have been humbled by the discovery that in spite of my initial teaching experiences, I know next to nothing about high school writing and high school English classes—and I am not alone. I have been equally humbled by the rich, insightful, theoretical discussions I have had recently with my colleagues in Maine high schools. I have been reminded that the average high school English teacher is just that—an English teacher, not a dedicated composition teacher—and thus faces a much wider variety of curricular demands. These experiences have led me to explore paths for systematically exchanging information with my high school writing colleagues about this crucial transition.

High school students arriving to college first-year writing courses appear to find that much of what they have learned in the previous years is unrelated to what is now being asked of them. College faculty seem to know little about what high school teachers are asking students to do and why, and less about what high school students bring with them to the college writing classroom. High school teachers wonder whether they are preparing students most effectively for college work, while being required to prepare them to succeed on national, state-wide and local assessments. Student writers moving from high school to college are affected by this gap in communication and in pedagogy. The gap appears to be entrenched in a relative lack of available information to teachers across grades and institutions about each other’s activities and expectations. It is further cemented by the lack of high school faculty voices in the literature about the transition to college writing.

In Maine, where the work described here is situated, recent reports have focused on gaps in the readiness of Maine college students and in articulation of goals and expectations between high schools and colleges. The University of Maine system has instituted a “college readiness” task force to consider questions about students’ success across grade levels and to explore the mismatch between state-mandated high school outcomes and actual college expectations across disciplines. While collaborations among high schools and colleges—school partnerships, workshops for high school faculty by college programs, National Writing Project summer institutes—have been successfully operating here for quite some time, they do not focus on the specific nature of the high school-to-college transition students must navigate in and through their writing. Maine is surely not the only state facing these issues.

This article describes the preliminary exploratory process used to develop the research questions that will be addressed during a project to be offered in the 2005–2006 academic year. The project will bring together Maine high school and college faculty to learn from each other about our shared needs, methods and priorities, in a year long series of “conversations.” These will tackle questions generated by exploratory research, using focus groups of both high school and college faculty and first-year college students, as well as key informant interviews. The main purpose of these conversations will be to address the research questions by sharing knowledge about theory and practice in a guided setting. The article reviews the available literature, summarizes the research questions that have been developed in the exploratory focus group discussions, argues for the need to seek out high school and college voices early in the research process, and briefly outlines the 2005–2006 project.

What We Know from Existing Scholarship

Available published research identifies misperceptions by high school and college faculty about each other’s work, describes many of the actual shifts in expectations as students enter college, and identifies specific collaborative efforts between high school and college faculty and institutions. It also shows insufficiencies in three key areas of knowledge: little published research enables high school faculty voices in the discussion about students’ readiness for college work, offers research findings about the actual high school-to-college transition, or clarifies what researchers in the different domains of cognitive-developmental and social theory might have to say to each other about college readiness.

Misperceptions by high school and college faculty about each other’s work:

Many high school and college teachers have different understandings of what college writing courses are about. One study surveyed writing teachers at the University of California and local high schools about their priorities.¹ A number of the high school teachers preparing students for college emphasized reading and interpreting literature, considered writing as a way of expressing a pre-formed meaning, suggested formulas for structuring essays, and taught students that the use of the first-person I would not be acceptable in college (cited in Hjortshoj 28–29). High school teachers comment that their assumptions about how to prepare students for college are often based largely on their own undergraduate classroom experiences (Gardner 101). The authority a teacher gains from being able to say to a high school student “you will need to know this in college” is a powerful motivator (Stump, personal interview, 2005). In the University of California study cited above, however, a number of the college teachers reported different priorities: using a range of reading materials, emphasizing writing for discovering and exploring meaning, discouraging formulas for essay structures, and considering the use of I to be appropriate (qtd. in Hjortshoj 28–29).

College writing faculty are unfortunately not much more informed about the high school classroom, other than what they remember from their own experiences or isolated examples such as their own high school-aged children. They do not systematically study high school assessments or outcomes documents. They are often unaware of the deeply different experience of high school teaching. Fortune, Lamonica, and Neulieb, for example, describe high school classes of noisy and active students with abundant energy, students who know each other well (15–16). High school teachers may work harder than college colleagues, often teaching far more students and reading literally hundreds of papers; Daiker describes them as more “giving of self,” in a teaching situation that requires “total response” (10) for hours at a time.² That response includes working with students’ parents (Stump, personal interview, 2005).

Shifts in expectations as students enter college:

At least some of the high school students arriving to college experience dramatic shifts in the expectations they face. The many in-house publications produced by colleges and universities for incoming first-year students build on this shift in expectations. “One of the things you’ll discover freshman year,” says the Harvard guide Making the Most of College Writing, “is that the five-paragraph essay and other structures you’ve relied on in the past will not be flexible enough to meet the more complex demands of college writing” (6). It continues, “In college, professors will expect—and reward—ambitious topics, interesting questions, thorough analyses, and convincing arguments” (6), suggesting that in high school these were not expected. Dombek and Herndon, in their 2004 book Critical Passages: Teaching the Transition to College Composition, describe the standard forms and skills of summarizing, arranging information, providing supporting points for clear claims, clarity, or coherence as “too simple and limiting to succeed in creating the kind of writing we ask of our [college] students. Advanced academic essays should require more: they should ask writers to pose rigorous questions and speculate about multiple possible answers, analyze several texts at once, sustain complicated trains of thought . . .” (Dombek and Herndon 4).

Cobbs’s 2002 study of students, From Where They Sit: Stories of Students Making the Transition from High School Writing to College Writing, bears out this difficulty. First-year students in her study struggled with reading college-level assignments and making sense of feedback on their writing. They applied the parts of the assignment instructions with which they were most comfortable from their high school experiences, and were surprised by college teachers’ attention to grammatical errors and by how long college essays were supposed to be (181).³

Keith Hjortshoj, in his text for first-year students The Transition to College Writing, tells students that “in some very fundamental ways a college or a university is a different kind of learning environment in which you must become a different kind of student” (3). College means turning a corner, finding previous knowledge useful but only if the student can apply it to new situations. College courses, he suggests, are not a direct continuation of high school courses. In addition, the academic freedom enjoyed by many college teachers leads to sometimes dramatic variations in the ways classes are taught (14–16), another major difference for students.

Students, of course, are quite aware of these shifts. In one experiment reported by Perry, college students asked to comment on high school students’ papers suggested to their high school peers that college teachers invite risk and exploration of ideas, while high school teachers give structure and guidelines (4). Some of the college students actually reported nostalgia for the guided high school prompts and clear expectations (5).

Collaborative efforts between high school and college faculty and institutions:

To be very clear, both research and other collaborative work between high school and college teachers is, in many settings, flourishing. The National Writing Project and state Writing Project organizations, events like the renowned University of New Hampshire summer program and recent Keene State summer programs, and dozens of individual programs and efforts across the country create safe and productive environments for shared writing, curriculum development, writing teacher development, improved communication, and other rich experiences. The City University of New York-NYC Board of Education partnership, “Looking Both Ways,” founded in 1998 has succeeded in bringing together high school and college faculty to talk about literacy development, classroom practice, and “the tensions of teaching writing.” The program is founded on the belief that high school and college faculty need to respect each other, dialogue, visit each other’s settings, and share inquiry and reading sessions (www.lbw.cuny.edu).

Unfortunately, however, current literature about high school-college collaborations in writing instruction is difficult to find.⁴ “Type ‘high school/college writing partnerships’ into [any] search engine and the results are likely to be . . . sparse,” Perry says. “With few exceptions, such programs tend to fall into the areas of dual or joint enrollment or advanced placement programs” (1). Even though such collaborations are happening, much of the literature that is written about them is from the university perspective, often works by administrators describing collaborative efforts, the latter published largely in the 1980s (for a sampling of these articles, see this article’s bibliography).

These programs almost unilaterally take place on college campuses, implying, Perry suggests, that college is still the privileged place for teacher development (5). Even the “Looking Both Ways” program describes its purpose as training teachers to better prepare students for the English Regents exam, and offers its programs at higher education sites. In addition, the actual transition from high school to college—students’ experiences and writing teachers’ understandings—is not the focus of most of these programs.

Absence of high school faculty voices:

In the limited set of books and articles readily available about the high school-college writing transition, the stories are almost always told by college researchers about the high school-to-college experience or the supposed “deficiencies” in high school learning. Some of the post-secondary work appears to have been written without consultation with high school faculty. Cobbs points out that what little research there is into students’ writing experiences in high school, as related to their experiences in college, focuses quite often on asking current college students to reflect back to high school (15). Notable exceptions include Cobbs own work, Estrem’s 2000 study, A Study of Two Cultures and the Travelers Who Must Negotiate Them: High School Senior and College First-Year English Classes, and Binns’ 2004 study, Effects of Prior Writing-to-Learn Instruction as Students Make the Transition from High School to College (see annotated bibliography for brief summaries of these references).

Much of the scholarship about writing pedagogy and teacher-research at the secondary level does not explore the transition to college writing either. It generally emphasizes the writing process, multi-genre essays, exploration, and creative research projects (see for example works by Tom Romano, Margaret Soven, Linda Rief, and Nancy Atwell).⁵

Little focus on the actual high school-to-college transition:

What little research there is focused on the actual period of transition suggests that high school writing courses cannot be seen simply as a “feeder” for college writing courses. Jaxon encourages us to “imagine programs that enrich their [students’] writing experiences while in high school” (8) (emphasis mine), rather than asking them to begin working on college writing in high school. The students in senior high school English and first-year college composition may be only weeks apart in age, but, as Alsup and Bernard-Donals point out, they are simply not the same group: they are cognitively, developmentally, and emotionally different (131).

The very notion of an essence of “high school writing” or “college writing” is misguided. Nicolini emphasizes that “[E]ven if I saw my primary responsibility as a high school teacher to ‘get ’em ready’ for college, I don’t know exactly how I could do this. How do I get Jim ready for Stanford while getting Maria ready for MIT and Agnes ready for Ball State and Vince ready for Purdue . . . ?” (Budden et al. 76).

Beyond this diversity of destinations, what of the many high school students not planning to go to college? Alsup and Bernard-Donals point out that high school and college writing classes have distinctly different missions (117), and Jaxon argues that a “college” paper must be written in college; it is simply not the same artifact when produced in the high school classroom with its attendant atmosphere, goals, and student groups (9).⁶ This means that work on the transition from one to the other needs to move from a conceptual frame of “seamless transition” to a frame of “readiness” (Alsup and Bernard-Donals 130–131).

Little communication between cognitive-developmental and social theory:

Here again, we find little information in the literature about collaborative secondary-postsecondary research into the concept of readiness. Cognitive-developmental theory and social theory could both help in exploring the question of readiness, but the exchanges are infrequent between these two theoretical approaches. Cognitive-developmental theory is more often studied in education programs, and social theory is more often an influence on composition theory and college writing instruction.

Some of the literature suggests that the key might be in defining “readiness.” Lave and Wenger, for example, build from the extensive body of research in the past twenty years about the college setting as a new community. They argue that college students’ writing success is largely due to the successful adoption of a college identity (ctd. in Jaxon p. 9); students need to “imagine what it might mean to become a member of the academy” (Jaxon 11), rather than learn a set of skills we imagine to be transferable. In Literacy as Everyday Practice: Case Studies of Students and Literacy Instruction in High School, Community College and University Writing Classes, Oates argues that we must guide students to understanding that “they are learning not simply new forms of written language, but that more so, they are learning to participate in unfamiliar forms of social interaction” (v). Literacy, in this broad social sense, is not an autonomous set of academic skills but a socially situated and defined activity (Jaxon 3). “Readiness,” broadly defined, might include the acquisition of whatever enables a student to imagine him or herself in a particular way, or to be open to participating in unfamiliar forms of social interaction.

High schools and colleges alike might better focus on habits of mind and dispositions, not skills and tasks (Budden et al. 74), a set of flexible strategies for understanding and joining new “communities.” Teachers might, then, work to scaffold students’ interest in adopting these habits and strategies, offering students experiences in ways that expand their repertoire of available practices (Kent, personal interview).

This perspective, of course, rankles those scholars who have built general learning theories on the cognitive-developmental model of skills transfer. But there is developmental research that embraces broader perspectives, in particular that inspired by Vygotskien cognitive psychology. Vygotsky’s theory of zones of proximal development, widely used in European scholarship about writing development, depicts learning as occurring in a zone of difference between a student’s actual abilities (how he/she problem solves currently) and his/her potential development, determined by how he/she problem solves in collaboration with an adult or a more capable peer (Jaxon 3). This theory suggests that teachers need to pitch work that is neither too unchallenging (firmly set at students’ current ability level) nor beyond students’ zone of proximal development (Alsup and Bernard-Donals 128).

We should see this cognitive-developmental research as assisting in our understanding of readiness and complementing social perspectives. Unfortunately, the gap between education research and composition theory research is striking; as for practice, future high school teachers in education programs have little contact with composition theorists or even college writing teachers, once they have completed first-year writing requirements. Secondary English education faculty and English or composition faculty at colleges and universities often seem to exist in different spheres. Turf wars over who might teach the “Writing/Teaching of Writing” course at various institutions is a good case in point. WPAs and English educators rarely communicate in spite of their parallel work in preparing teachers of writing who will work with the same population at different developmental points (Tremmel 1).

Tremmel points out that “English teacher educators have yet to settle on a full commitment to viewing themselves as professional writing teacher educators” (9), but we can certainly also point to writing program administrators’ traditional disinterest in secondary education, in spite of the shared marginalization and neglect both groups traditionally share (Tremmel 3). Indeed, college writing instructors should be the first to feel a strong sense of solidarity with high school faculty on the subject of transferability. College teachers find themselves under siege from their colleagues across the disciplines who expect first-year composition to teach students the writing skills they need for success across the curriculum and who question writing programs when students are not delivered to them “fault-free.”

II. Exploratory Inquiry into High School and College Concerns in Maine

My interest in exploring the ways in which the issues described in the literature are playing out in practice in the Maine secondary-postsecondary public education system has led to the development of a collaborative research project, the “Calderwood Conversations.” This project will take place during the 2005–2006 academic year, funded by the Calderwood Writing Initiative⁷ The project will be described in more detail in section III; here, I will describe the current situation in Maine and the exploratory work done to develop the research questions that will guide the Calderwood project.

The specific case of Maine: concerns about college readiness

In 2004 the MELMAC Education Foundation hosted a statewide conference for university and community college representatives, designed to explore priorities for improving Maine students’ access to and success in college. While Maine K-12 students succeed at higher rates than in many other states, college enrollment and college graduation rates are lower than in other states: “Maine’s K-12 students, while achieving success in elementary and secondary school, under-perform in post-secondary education” (MELMAC Education Foundation 5). The Mitchell Institute’s 2002 Barriers to Postsecondary Educationcomes to the same conclusionsas the Foundation about priority areas for action: the need to help high school students connect their college aspirations to a specific plan of action, and the need to support early success in college (9).

According to a report prepared for the University of Maine Chancellor’s Task Force on College Readiness, one of the key areas in which this connection and support is not happening is writing instruction:

Many students who graduate from Maine high schools, meet the State’s standardized “Learning Results,” and are accepted to college are not prepared for college-level writing. The SAT, which most of the System’s universities use to measure college readiness, Maine’s Learning Results, and the tasks given to students in the first weeks of 100-level writing courses in college all focus on students’ abilities to

• evaluate an author’s assumptions, point of view, and purpose.
• analyze and synthesize concepts and details.
• determine the relevance of information in a passage.

This correspondence suggests that these particular aspects of the Learning Results are important to students’ access to and success in higher education.

The Learning Results frequently use terms such as “evaluate” and “analyze,” but do not refer to arguments, evidence, or logic, which tend to be central to discussions of writing at the college level. In the Learning Results and in the local assessments used to measure students’ learning, there is much more focus on “point of view” and “opinion” than on any of these terms.

The Maine Educational Assessment writing prompts separate reading from writing, asking students to produce narratives filled with detailed description. They are significantly different from the prompts found on the new SAT and those used by Maine Universities for determining whether or not students need remediation. (Chancellor’s Report on College Readiness 1)

Notice in particular that these students are achieving on standardized tests and are meeting state and local expectations. This implies that the trouble might at least partly be at the level of what those expectations are and their articulation between high school and college. Maine is not alone in this problem. According to Mixed Messages: What State High School Tests Communicate about Student Readiness for College, of the twenty five states using or developing high school exit exams to certify graduation, only Georgia describes the exam as able to identify college readiness (1). Most state officials agree that skills and abilities needed in college are not linked to the content of the high school exit exams (1).

In addition, nationwide studies question the relationship between high school graduation and college readiness. Greene and Forster reported in a 2003 working paper for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research that while 70 percent of all students in United States public schools graduate, only 32 percent are actually qualified to attend four-year colleges at graduation (www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ewp_03.htm 1). They determine “qualification” based on three characteristics: completing high school, taking the minimum requisite courses for admission to virtually all colleges, and achieving minimum competency on a national reading test (11–12). It is interesting to note that this national survey corroborates Maine’s findings, highlighting the Northeast as a region in which high school graduation rates are higher than the national average, but college readiness rates are lower (15). Another study sponsored by a consortium of universities that belong to the Association of American Universities, “Mixed Messages: What State High School Tests Communicate about Student Readiness for College,” studied 66 exams in twenty states and found that “state high school exams bear an inconsistent relationship to the knowledge and skills necessary for college success” (1).

Exploratory Work: Finding the Right Research Questions

Researching the transition to college writing in a way that includes both high school and college voices requires including both groups early in the process. In the fall of 2004, I carried out three exploratory focus group meetings and five targeted “key informant” interviews with public college teachers working in first-year composition programs, first-year public college students, and public high school teachers. I also participated in several informal discussions with the Maine Composition Coalition—faculty and WPAs from many of the public university and community college institutions—about first-year composition and college readiness. The nature of the schools represented and the communities they serve was not part of the focus of this preliminary exploration, but the key informants’ perspectives rounded out the more local concerns of individual faculty and institutions.

This exploratory work was designed to ensure the development of research questions that are thoroughly grounded in high school and college experiences, based on high school and college voices.

The focus groups were:

• Mt. Blue High School English faculty: John Logan, Leanne Condon, and Dan Ryder.
• Maine Writing Project members (high school faculty): Cynthia Dean, Tanya Baker, Maureen Montgomery, Lincoln MacIsaac, Dave Boardman, and Debra Butterfield. This second group included a mix of faculty teaching in the middle school, high school and college settings, although all teach high school as part of their load. Some were pursuing doctoral work at various stages.
• University of Maine-Farmington students in First Year Seminar and ENG 100

The targeted informant interviews included:

• Ann Dean, Director of Composition, University of Southern Maine and representative for writing issues to the Chancellor’s College Readiness Task Force.
• Lynne Miller, Chair of the Chancellor’s College Readiness Task Force and Director, Maine Partnerships.
• Kika Stump, Chair of the Maine Council for English Language Arts, full-time high school teacher.
• Mary Schwanke, The director of the University of Maine-Farmington portion of an NSF project on high school and college curriculum in the sciences and mathematics.
• Richard Kent, The director of the Maine Writing Project and Education faculty member at University of Maine-Orono.

Focus group and key informant research methods were chosen because of the exploratory nature of the preliminary research stage. These methods are most appropriate for exploring participants’ knowledge about an issue, learning the language and vocabulary of a particular group, and generating hypotheses for further testing; they “generate new ideas or ways of looking at an issue because, by definition, the process is open-ended” (www.communication.gc.ca/services 2). The National Science Foundation Handbook on Designing Mixed Method Evaluations suggests that focus groups are particularly valuable for “generating data and insights that would be unlikely to emerge without the interaction found in a group,” (www.her.nsf.gov/HER/REC/pubs/NSF97–153/CHAP_HTM 9) while key informants offer information that captures the essence of the issue being discussed, are knowledgeable about project participants, and can help a researcher to better understand both the issue and the participants (www.her.nsf.gov/HER/REC/pubs/NSF97–153/CHAP_HTM 14). They offer “insider” points of view and are helpful in creating connections with other relevant groups (15).

The focus groups interviewed for this exploratory research met in informal settings (e.g., a café, a high school classroom, and a college classroom). Each group met for an hour and a half. In two sessions I acted as moderator, posing general questions and prompting participants to give more detail as needed; in the third, a Maine Writing Project director acted as moderator. The general questions, listed in the appendix, were developed from the directions provided by the literature review and the guidance provided by the key informant interviews, but were designed to allow each focus group discussion to shape itself based on participants’ priorities for discussion. Participants’ responses were recorded in notes I took as each participant spoke. The overall purpose of the discussions, as presented to the participants, was to identify issues of concern that would generate the research questions to pursue in the 2005–2006 research project. My main concern as the principal researcher was to develop those research questions collaboratively through this process, rather than imposing them based on my own concerns or priorities.

Eight main areas of concern emerged for future research. They are listed here, with sample specific questions generated by the participants provided after each question.

1. How do the writing process, peer review and collaborative writing play out in each setting?

High school teachers: We require at least 2–3 drafts and spend 50–60 hours a week responding to writing. We hear that in college there is no drafting work. What is the college drafting process like? Why don’t newer teachers coming into the high school system understand the writing process; why haven’t they learned how to teach it? How do we reorient students’ “three edits we’re done” approach and help them to be open to change in their drafts?

College teachers: How is the drafting process actually taught in high school classes? Is the high school drafting process just a series of mechanical edits? Are students in both high school and college learning to produce poor first drafts in order to get credit for improving them?

Both groups: How do we let students know that we ourselves struggle as writers on a daily basis, often turning in less-than-perfect pieces because of deadlines?

2. What forms and structures are de facto prioritized for students’ writing? Why?

High school teachers: How can we help our students to understand that the five-paragraph-essay is only one piece in the larger picture of writing abilities? We feel caught between the statewide test, “local assessments,” and wanting to do what pedagogical and composition theory says we should. Do college teachers realize that the state-wide assessment test is the centerpiece of high school writing through the junior year, making it, for many students, the final year of unified required writing instruction? Do college teachers know that the state assessment “constructed response” assignment is the most frequently taught form, but that in order to succeed with respect to the Maine Learning Results,⁸ students must know different traditional genres and know different ways to produce them (not just one)? If the five-paragraph-essay is discouraged in first-year composition, why is it expected in some other college courses? Has writing changed since our own college experiences?

College teachers: Can the new SAT writing prompt act as a catalyst for exchanges about student writing and about our priorities in high school and college writing courses?

What’s in the standardized Maine Learning Results and how do they affect high school classes? Do the Maine Learning Results actually matter in college writing? Which don’t? Can innovative assignments like multi-genre essays still enable student success? Has high school writing changed in the past few years?

3. What do assignment prompts look like: intent, depth, complexity, shape and sequencing?

High school teachers: Can college faculty teach us about sequenced assignments and complex writing prompts? How is the link between analytic ability and creativity being developed in college? How do colleges teach students creativity?

College teachers: How do high school teachers encourage flexibility and strategies for independence in high school writers through the assignments they devise?

Both groups: Why do students do expressive writing well, but “fall apart” when they are asked to produce persuasive writing? Is the implicit hierarchy of expressive writing for “starters” and then, developmentally, other kinds of writing, a legitimate hierarchy?

4. How is written work evaluated, and using what criteria?

High school teachers: How do we help students to internalize standards for good writing? And get students to the point of recognizing for themselves what might be effective or need revision in a piece? On the other hand, how do we un-internalize the need for grading and standards?

College teachers: Why do high school students appear to expect high grades for effort? How can we open a dialogue about “C” standards and about criteria for grading? What do high school teachers point out to their students when they judge an essay?

Both groups: When there are minimum standards at each level, are they actually respected? Have students graduating high school actually mastered the abilities listed in the Maine Learning Results (whether we agree with them or not)? Are students in first-year composition truly judged on the outcomes a program describes? Is there pressure to pass students?

5. What is the role of research and citation work? How is plagiarism considered?

High school teachers: Is the “research paper” a helpful high school activity? (The high school teachers interviewed assumed that the research paper is still a key college activity.) How is plagiarism considered or discussed in college? How are students taught to read and to integrate textual evidence into their writing in college? What is the relationship to texts read and to authors’ authority in college? How do we help students keep their voices and develop effective persuasive or researched thoughts? What about the multigenre essay? Students are very invested in these pieces and value their work with them, but high school colleagues don’t always see the value in these innovative pieces. How can we change that?

College teachers: In high school, how do teachers work with research? How do they work with plagiarism? Are they teaching a particular research process?

Both groups: How do we help students to avoid “patchwork research papers”? What can we do when confronted with strategies and perspectives among our students that are not part of our own traditions: heavy reliance on Internet searching, for example, or different assumptions about intellectual property assumptions that seem alien to the academic world? How can we work with students’ tendency to get caught up in writing stilted “academia-like” work, losing all personal voice?⁹

6. What is the shape of writing across the curriculum and writing in other subject areas: writing about literature, writing for English class, and “other” writing?

High school teachers: Should students be writing about their feelings in response to literature, or should we help them to develop intellectual points of view? Is the time spent on “English class” writing helpful to students in other high school subject areas? What do students write in other subject areas?

Both groups: Do teachers in other disciplines see the need to teach writing? Do they know how to use writing (such as a journal) to explore content or knowledge, to think, to think through or about subjects and ideas? When we teach students how to write “for English,” in particular to write literary analysis or first-year composition essays, is that sufficient? Is the knowledge that students gain “transferable”?

7. How are students motivated to write, to write authentically, to write for an audience?

High school teachers: What is the role for audience considerations? How can we help students to write authentic pieces? Are students being too hand-held in high school, not sufficiently challenged? How would we know? Where should we be saying, “I’ll help you step by step,” and where, “OK, you’re on your own”? How will these decisions help our students’ writing and progress?

College teachers: Students are simply not invested in what academia wants them to learn; can high school teachers help us to understand why?

Both groups: What is the role of expressive writing in student motivation: does it help to produce relevance and caring? What is authenticity, authentic writing and authentic assignments, vs. packaged school-based approaches to writing? What can we learn about the necessary artificiality of “school” work in relation to a student’s “own” work, writing that students produce independent of any academic assignment?¹⁰

8. What rules and conventions seem most influential in each setting?

Both groups:. Where do the myths about not using “I” in college writing begin? One teacher pointed out that writing at selective private colleges in Maine by and large privileges the use of “I,” while in high school, students are often taught to avoid it at all costs.

As for other conventions, how can we possibly cover everything? What do we choose or prioritize? What aspects of “correctness” are considered most important in high school or in college, and how do colleagues make decisions about what to prioritize?

In general, focus group participants indicated great interest in finding out more about each other, and in particular about what we mean by “high school writing” and “college writing.” Both groups wondered whether there is a single unified kind of writing in either category, and what “getting ready for college writing” actually means. High school faculty expressed frustration that students and parents alike look for “how to do” college writing, what the one right way is, or what the experts say about the right way or wrong way to write. Finally, both high school and college faculty stated that they have neither the time nor the institutionally-supported opportunity to broach these subjects even among themselves, let alone with others across institutional levels.

The student focus groups’ results essentially corroborated both the literature review and the faculty focus group results, validating the research questions we will pursue in the larger Calderwood project. Students involved in the discovery focus groups expressed great frustration about the lack of communication between high school and college writing programs. They are quite aware of the gaps described and frustrated by unexpected transition issues. They report major shifts in college expectations; they acknowledge not taking high school exit assessments seriously and are quick to offer advice to their high school counterparts about what they wish they had been told in high school.¹¹

III. A Project for Change: The Calderwood Conversations

How might we determine together what is best for high school and college students in writing courses, in a way that supports the transition students must make? What is each of us trying to do, and why? What do we think it will accomplish? How are we doing it, and why? What theories support and explore what we do?

Literature that works at these questions is available at both the high school and the college levels, but specific to each level. The point here is not to claim that these questions have not already been treated, that no answers have been proposed, although perhaps many teachers working in the trenches of both high school and college have not yet been part of the conversation. The point is that high school and college teachers and teacher educators are by and large not talking with each other about these questions, reading each other’s literature, discussing each other’s practices and their contexts.

College faculty need the exchange as much as high school faculty. It serves no one for us to operate as if our students have no history¹² (or worse, a defective history). We can become better teachers through an informed understanding of students’ various and complex high school writing experiences. At the same time, both the exploratory focus group discussions reported here and larger theoretical and cognitive-developmental research projects have made clear the fact that high school practices should not be college practices simply begun earlier. The literature reviewed suggests that socially, practically, and cognitively there are strong reasons for looking at high school writing instruction as something other than a “feeder” for college writing.

The “Calderwood Conversations” project will offer eight monthly conversations in the 2005–2006 academic year, for high school and college writing faculty, targeting the questions or topics identified by the focus groups. The focus group work has provided, as we have seen, a series of questions about which high school and college writing teachers might begin to dialogue.¹³ These questions form the basis of the agenda for the one-year collaborative project I describe here. The conversations will be modeled after projects like one in Vancouver, British Columbia, orchestrated by Wendy Strachan,¹⁴ whose high school-college “dialogues” project helped us to see the value of creating two complementary groups, a smaller core working group and a larger discussion group. Our project will be guided by a small planning group of three high school and three college writing teachers, advised by many of the same people who participated in the focus group discovery stage.

The exploratory process has been helpful not only because it involved high school faculty from the beginning, but also because we are now able to adjust our information-gathering approach based on the first phase. It has enabled us to realize that any teachers involved in continuing dialogue need to feel ownership of the conversations or projects. This ownership must be real—and that means we must set aside preconceived notions about what we expect to encounter or to prioritize. Focus group participants suggested that the best way to encourage change was to circulate student work and allow others to see exciting student products. They felt this cross-grade level sharing was much more likely to get teachers on board than any form of professional development, and help them to build respect for each other as teachers and colleagues.

The planning group will also propose shared reading of available literature on the high school-to-college transition and theoretical works cited by high school and college teachers as key influences on their composition teaching. This reading will be designed to familiarize each group with theoretical perspectives important to the other.

While the exploratory stage was limited to a few small groups, not necessarily representative, the Calderwood Conversations will be publicized to all public high schools and colleges within a 60-mile range of the location for each conversation. The locations will shift around mid-Maine, in order to offer the most opportunity possible to the broadest range of faculty. In order to encourage participation, participants’ travel expenses will be covered and participants will receive a small stipend. Continuing Education Units will be provided for high school faculty.

Each “conversation” will last three hours and will include a meal, a roundtable discussion of readings, and applied work on artifacts (student texts, assignments, classroom activities), made possible by the Calderwood Writing Initiative grant mentioned earlier. Members of the planning committee will take turns leading the discussions and workshops. The planning committee discussions, the roundtable conversations, and the applied work sessions will be systematically recorded by rotating note-takers; the data gathered will be studied by the planning committee and used for proposals for future study, for curricular reform, for additional projects encouraging secondary-postsecondary dialogue, for developing a meta-language for future discussions, and for publication of recommendations for high school and college writing faculty. In the future, this information might help to improve faculty awareness as high school and college teachers talk with their students. We will track participants’ institutional affiliations so that we can carefully study student and teacher demographics, location, and other contextual factors for each participant.

The literature search and the focus group responses have provided some very clear philosophical guidelines for the project. The “one way street of college preparation must become a two-way exchange of rhetorical awareness,” Perry reminds us. High school and college students and teachers need to know about how thinking and writing processes develop and why expectations in high school and college are different (Perry 2). “While there can be no doubt about the need for college-prep programs, there is also need for free and equal exchange of information, heuristics, values and assumptions between secondary and post-secondary spheres” (2). In particular, projects must not be built as ways to “help” high school teachers (3), but a process of finding out what would be useful for each group (Budden et al. 76).

The Calderwood project will answer the call made by Tremmel and others to “open negotiations on how we might reroute and regrade [our] common path, starting with conversations about what life would be like if we were to remove some of the impediments that keep us apart” (13). He envisions the same complementarity evoked by Alsup, calling for “alliances based on our consilient actions and needs in order to build a broader, more coherent mutually supportive academic and institutional base for ourselves” (1).

The University of Maine at Farmington (UMF) appears to be an ideal setting for trying out such an alliance. It is a selective public liberal arts university with a strong teacher education program. It recently participated in a three-year National Science Foundation (NSF) project bringing together high school and college faculty and secondary education majors in science and math. The local high school, Mt. Blue High School, offers student teaching and practicum experiences to many UMF education majors; Mt. Blue English faculty are actively involved in professional development and have participated in National Writing Project activities; 10–20 Mt. Blue High School students attend UMF each year.

Our project will also include an English secondary education student from UMF (a project assistant for independent study “Writing and the Teaching of Writing” course credit, and a work initiative student funded by UMF for additional project assistance). Students in the regularly scheduled “Writing and the Teaching of Writing” course at UMF will also be invited to the conversations. This inclusion will have the secondary effect of improving the communication between the next generation of high school writing teachers and college composition faculty and modeling both the overall conversation series and the cross-level communication for other schools.

In order to determine the value and success of this collaboration, the planning team will develop specific project goals from the outset and then check the project against those goals mid-year and at the end of the project. We will invite an outside evaluator to look at our project regularly and to assess our progress and effectiveness.

Conclusion

The preliminary, eye-opening experience of focus group meetings and interviews has given me pause. I have learned how difficult it is to avoid thinking that I have the “right” knowledge for my high school colleagues. I have learned that sitting with a group of high school colleagues is a moment in shared concerns and rich exchange. I have learned that I need to know what they know, and that they might like to know more about my work. I see the spaces for far more opportunity for dialogue.

The insufficient information about what readiness for college writing means and the under-representation of high school faculty voices in published discussions on the subject make projects like the one described here vital to improving our understanding of high school-to-college transition issues. This kind of project is already developing in other settings; consider, for example, a program like New York’s Looking Both Ways. That offers fellowships to high school participants. According to Looking Both Ways program material ( www.lbw.cuny.edu/) , these fellowships create the opportunity to collaborate in exploring a research problem or question high school and college faculty define together. The fellowships support classroom inquiry leading to publishable results, through intense seminars and ample opportunity for research and exchange.

I would like to encourage writing faculty to create similar projects, paying particularly close attention to how to craft the project based on the expressed interests of high school and college writing faculty and how to frame the project in the context of available research. In a year’s time, we hope to be presenting new, in-depth information generated by our collaborative work with this project; I expect I will not be the only humbled, yet enlightened, member of our group.

Appendix One: Preliminary Focus Group Questions

• What is on your mind as a writing teacher?
• What do you know about (high school) (college) writing instruction?
• Where have you learned what you know?
• What would you like to know about (high school) (college) writing instruction?
• What do you wish (high school) (college) colleagues knew about your work? About your students?
• What resources inform your composition teaching?
• What are your major challenges as a teacher?
• What are you least and most sure about in your composition teaching?

Each group expanded the discussion beyond these preliminary prompts, based on interests and experiences.

Notes

1 McClelland, Kathleen, et al. “College Preparatory vs. College Reality.” Unpublished report to participating schools, South Coast Writing Project and Program in Composition, University of California Santa Barbara, 1990.

2 Some college writing faculty are full time professors with many other responsibilities, including research and publication demands; others are adjuncts teaching at multiple institutions with a variety of pedagogical frames. A large number of first-year composition teachers are graduate students or full-time adjunct faculty. I do not mean to imply that any one group systematically works harder than any other—something that surely differs across individuals more than across situations—only that college writing faculty insisting on imposing certain approaches or methods on high school faculty may not be knowledgeable about the demanding high school context.

3 In a surprising turn, Cobbs notes that the five-paragraph structure was far less omnipresent in the students’ high school experiences than she expected, at least in their senior year (181).

4 A notable exception: the National Writing Project’s website, rich with resources and researched reports (www.writingproject.org).

5 While this scholarship portrays a vision of secondary school writing that is not overly structured or focused on stifling guidelines, it often remains the ideal proposed in publications rather than actual classroom practice in regulated and standards-based high school classrooms.

6 Jay Simmons described, in a 2004 interview with the author, a Boston-area FIPSE-sponsored project in the 1980s, designed to bring together high school and college students and faculty working on similar writing assignments. While much of the project was successful, he underscores the one apparent failure in the project: high school students, still immersed in the high school setting, did not make progress at the same rate as the college and community college participants even though they were rated as equally strong writers at the outset. He suggests this was partly because they simply did not yet consider themselves to be college students.

7 The Calderwood Writing Initiative, directed by John Brereton, is supported by the Boston Athenaeum.

8 The Maine Learning Results are Maine’s standards for success in K-12 education: http://www.state.me.us/education/lres/homepage.htm

9 “Voice” is, of course, a contested concept—highly theorized, differently valued and taught in different contexts. Because this brief article’s focus is on the questions raised by the exploratory research, it is not the place for an extended discussion about what is meant by “voice.” The subject will most certainly be part of the extended discussions evolving from the 2005–2006 Calderwood Conversations.

10 See, for example, Cynthia Selfe’s work about students who read and write extensively outside of school, for their own purposes, but are judged minimally competent as readers and writers in school settings. The students’ teachers in Selfe’s study were unaware of students’ literate activities outside of school.

11 Students described, for example, surprise that few writing assignments take the shape of a five-paragraph-essay in college, and that they were not writing everywhere—sometimes not at all—in their first college semester. Students noted, in their high school experiences, never having had to juggle many complex ideas, organize, synthesize ideas, develop, elaborate, defend, or explore ideas, and rarely writing essays longer than three pages. Students had not had assignments relate to each other in a series or a sequence. Many reported not reading in high school or, more frequently, remembered reading without discussing what was read. The state assessment was widely reported as not being taken seriously; students reported skipping school or handing tests in blank; others talked of school administrators offering rewards for students who came to school on testing day. Finally, students reported wishing that in college, the “scaffolding” or steps offered for responding to assignments in high school would still be offered in college.

12 I am indebted to Susan Wall at Northeastern University for framing this issue for me years ago, when she pointed out that unfortunately most composition theorists appear to believe academic discourse and the intellectual awakening that accompanies it (in the best of circumstances) begin at the university.

13 The research in preparation for the focus group meetings resulted in an annotated bibliography, available at the end of this article.

14 For more information on this project, see T. Thompson, ed., Teaching Writing in High School and College, 2002.

Works Cited

Alsup, Janet, and Michael Bernard-Donals. “The Fantasy of the ‘Seamless Transition.’” Teaching Writing in High School and College: Conversations and Collaborations. Ed. Thompson, Thomas/ Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 2002.

Binns, Donna. Effects of Prior Writing-to-Learn Instruction as Students Make the Transition from High School to College. Dissertation, University of Kansas, 2004.

Budden, Herb, et. al. “What We Talk about When We Talk about College Writing.” Teaching Writing in High School and College: Conversations and Collaborations. Ed. Thompson, Thomas/ Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 2002.

Carson, Joan G. Academic Demands of the Undergraduate Curriculum: What Students Need. Georgia: Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, 1993.

Chancellor’s Report on College Readiness. University of Maine System. Orono, Maine: University of Maine, 2005.

Cobb, Victoria. From Where They Sit: Stories of Students Making the Transition from High School Writing to College Writing Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2002.

Daly, William. College-School Collaboration; Appraising the Major Approaches. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1985.

Daiker, Don. “Scriptless in High School: Teaching Dreams of a College Professor.” Teaching Writing in High School and College: Conversations and Collaborations. Ed. Thompson, Thomas/ Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 2002.

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Donham, Jean. “My Senior Year Student Is Your First-Year Student: High School Transition to College.” Knowledge Quest 32.1 (2003).

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