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Eric H. Hobson The invitation to "write/right the wrongs" in college composition is seductive. Admittedly, when asked to participate in this project, I leaned toward polemic--the invitation seemed to beg, "Say what you've always wanted to say about college composition." The invitation offered free space in which to articulate the Solution that rallies everyone to produce the high levels of student communicative ability that our institutional mission statements allude to and that our course catalogues and outcome statements promise. That offer is hard to refuse. Equally hard was determining what about college composition I wished to focus on. Thankfully, my colleagues' chapters cover many topics about which I have an opinion. Also, their chapters' comprehensiveness--along with my chapter's position at the end of the collection--allows me to shift the discussion somewhat. I offer no cure-all prescription for what's ailing college composition. Instead, this chapter flirts with the issue of what it will really take for college writing teachers to deliver the outcomes that we have promised to our stakeholders: students, colleagues, administrations, parents, boards, alumni, legislatures, regulators, and accreditation agencies. What is needed, I believe, already exists; we really don't need new theories, or worse, new paradigms. Theory building and paradigm shifting often are activities of convenience: they make a minority group in the process of higher education (e.g., composition specialists) feel productive, even profound; they provide excuses to forego hard, down-n-dirty work in the trenches of writing classes found across post-secondary education. As authors in the preceding chapters have pointed out, too often those positing theories about writing instruction teach decidedly few students, especially student writers in the first-year composition sequence--the location drawing the most institutional and external fire.Working from studies of student learning styles and learning preferences, I suggest that for any fix-it plan to reform writing instruction--from the 1st year writing sequence on--we must redirect our theory-building, curriculumgenerating, teacher-training gaze. Most revision agendas for composition are articulated from a perspective that views students predominately as composite groups, wholes comprised of subsets often differentiated along racial, gender, and socioeconomic lines. While the nod is given to these differences--differences that do affect educational opportunities--scant attention is given to how these students learn and how that situation differs from student to student. Implicit in this lack of consideration are two unwarranted assumption: | | Students, for the most part, learn best in ways condoned or defined by the academy. | | | Students share (or, should adopt) their instructors' learning preferences and biases. |
To make the types of learning gains that reformers have heralded will result from the ascendancy of X or Y change to composition instruction, the crafters of and apologists for these projects must focus their gaze on the needs of the individual students who will sit in the writing classes offered as a result of their curricular revisions. 1 Then, the teachers who teach the resulting writing classes must acknowledge and work with these students' individual needs in ways that enable students to use their specific learning styles to succeed in each course, while also helping them to develop a broader range of learning strategies that require students to use less comfortable ways of knowing. 2 Gains of the type long claimed by compositionists and long demanded by outside stakeholders will happen only when writing instruction works in concert with the variety and diversity of learning systems on which students rely in any given classroom. Put simply, most writing instruction at the college level ignores what is known about how students learn. From this chapter's outset, however, I must state that I have my doubts about how willing are college composition teachers (me included) to meet the challenges I describe. If we are willing, great; however, there will be costs, many of which could disrupt our routines and programs. If not, we must reconsider the promises we make to our many constituents. WHERE I'M COMING FROM The 1980s and 1990s have been particularly boisterous within composition studies as composition theorists, critics, researchers, and practitioner communities championed any number of "correctives" to the dominant philosophical and instructional paradigms on which writing programs (most often first-year writing programs) are based. 3 We've witnessed the rise, fall, reclamation, and reformulation of many models: Current Traditional Rhetoric, Expressivism, The Process Movement, Social Constructivism, Cultural Studies--some of which now sport "Neo" prefixes to symbolize their reemergent status in the community. Expressivist and neo-expressivist theorists have argued that a continued focus on the individual experience is an important part of a writer's developing sense of self and actual discursive ability as an individual within a social and cultural context. Proponents of cultural studies have argued that writing courses benefit from having an informed critical center that enables students to examine such thematic issues as race, power, politics, and economics. This position links their corrective plan to similar calls for reform that would have first-year writing courses center around critical thinking/problem-solving foci. Responding to Writing Across the Curriculum's (WAC) success, others (see Sampson, this volume) see a remedy to the traditional paradigm in a writing sequence with a distinctly disciplinary focus, often spread over several years of study. Regardless of each proposal's logic, merit, and consistency with the best of both liberal arts and professional education, a fundamental flaw allows their corrective measures limited hopes for success. Most of the existing "correctives" cannot achieve the student learning outcomes expected (realistically or not) of required college-level writing courses--courses considered essential for academic and social/citizenry success--at least not at the programmatic level. Reflecting a systemic problem in U.S. higher education, each is predicated on an uncritical, uninformed, and unrealistic understanding of their clientele, students. Even when they congratulate themselves on crafting classrooms that are in the students' best interests, and, thus, seem to have given close scrutiny to the needs of each student in the class, or course, or program, they don't. For the most part, the correctives presented in the past two decades paint students taking writing courses--first year or beyond--with too broad a brush. These plans fail to consider the students in the classes as distinct individuals, not homogenous groups of 20 to 30. For the most part, these reform plans treat students as institutional amalgams, undifferentiated blocks of registration numbers making up specific segments of the institution's student body. Consider the sheer number of students in some type of post-secondary education at any one moment, however, and it is not surprising that individual student needs get lost in the crowd. Colleges are bureaucracies, and in most respects curricula are designed to meet needs other than student needs. These plans do not acknowledge (because they fail to even consider them) the variety of learning styles and preferences that students bring to the composition classroom--as well as to their every academic and nonacademic learning experience. As individuals who negotiate their way through the world each day, these students bring with them learning algorithms through which they make sense of the world at-large and of immediate classroom instruction. STUDENT DEMOGRAPHICS What most college-level teachers know about their students comes from surface markers that provide somewhat reliable predictors about students' ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic backgrounds, and so on. This information is easy to gather and is often supplied, unasked for, in one form or another by the academic institution. There also exists a readily accessible, but consistently ignored, literature coming out of research into the ways that people go about learning. Faculty developers, teaching and learning specialists, and other academicians have worked to make this information an integral part of curricular planning, class structures, and assessment across the curriculum, as well as part of institutional academic support activities. Little of this information, however, has shaped the correctives offered for teaching college-level writing classes, even though it should. 4 The demographic information available paints a complex picture of students and their teachers. Studies of college student populations have produced findings that can help teachers understand important things about how students develop during their time on college campuses. The development studied ranges from emotional and intellectual maturation ( Bloom, Perry, Kolb), to moral development ( Belenky et al:, Gilligan), to personality definition ( Myers and Myers; Lawrence), to gender-influence within all these developmental domains ( Belenky, et.al., Gilligan). A cursory review of several frequently cited developmental models provides a glimpse into the rich data available to writing teachers who wish to know more about who are their students as thinkers and learners. INTELLECTUAL AND ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT Most comprehensively presented in Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme ( 1970), William Perry's model of intellectual and ethical development is the most widely applied model of such development for traditional undergraduate students. 5 His comprehensive model presents a nine stage process of achieving cognitive maturity; however, the simpler four stage model is the version most frequently referred to in the literature. 6 Typical undergraduate students progress ideally through the following stages of development during their collegiate lives, too: dualism, multiplicity, relativism, commitment. Each stage is marked by fairly typical attitudes, worldviews, and behavior. Dualism: Students view the world and knowledge in black-and-white terms; their actions and beliefs are governed by absolute standards of right and wrong; teachers are authorities who provide the correct answers. Multiplicity: Students acknowledge that uncertainty exists; however, they don't like it and believe that if they find the competent/right authority, they will find the right answer. Ambiguity suggests incompetence. Relativism: Students no longer look to authority figures for truth, because they now believe that all answers/interpretations are equally valid. They embrace a "whatever works for you" perspective toward knowledge. Commitment: Students begin to create criteria that they can use to help them make decisions that they can stand by within a relativistic knowledge framework. They rely on articulated criteria to make decisions and to justify their choices. Within the composition community's literature, one of the few recent ( 1993) discussions of Perry's model and its uses for teaching writing is The Critical Writing Workshop, edited by Toni-Lee Campossela. This text illustrates my earlier comment that most discussions of composition courses maintain a programmatic, institutional gaze; their details and planning focus less on individual student needs than on other issues. Even in this collection of essays, where the discussion's stated focus on instructional strategies for developing students' critical thinking skills, only three (two by Campossela) of this collection's twelve chapters place the instructional design advocated within a cognitive development framework that acknowledges the individualized nature of students' critical thinking development. In the chapter, "Using William Perry's Scheme to Encourage Critical Writing," Campossela lends her assessment to the point made by a range of authors in the teaching and learning/faculty development community (e.g., Bonwell & Sutherland; Grasha; Miller, Groccia, & Wilkes) that carefully planned and articulated course and program structure is essential to help students move from one cognitive position to another. To assist students as they develop as critical thinkers and writers, teachers must plan activities with students' current cognitive developmental levels in mind. Campossela states: If the demands of the course are pitched more than one stage beyond a student's current cognitive level, she is likely to become alienated and baffled. In particular, dualistic students who fear that they are in over their heads become even more reliant on authorities' opinions and less likely to take risks in their writing. To reduce the potential for alienation, support is required in assorted forms and lavish amounts: a nothreatening classroom atmosphere, many ungraded forms of writing, various kinds of collaboration and feedback, discussion of sample essays, and multiple opportunities to re-draft and revise. ( 60 ) Partially in reaction to Perry's exclusively use of male examples to illustrate the steps in his model, Mary Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, and Jill Tarule interviewed 135 women in an attempt to identify the processes that women use to make decisions, interact with others, and accept/reject knowledge. 7 Labeling the resulting themes "ways of knowing," Belenky et al. produced a model of cognitive development in women that can be best summarized in a tripartite manner: | | Received Knowledge: Information is either correct or not; there are fixed ways of looking at the world; and, authorities are there to tell one what to think and how to (inter)act in the presence of ambiguous information/situations. | | | Subjective Knowledge: Ambiguity is a fact of life and leads naturally to many points of view. These different perspectives are equally valuable. | | | Procedural Knowledge: There are differences between opinions and available options: some sources and opinions are better than others. Best decisions are arrived at by balancing external criteria (logic, data, evidence) with internal criteria (feelings, relationships, beliefs). |
In Teaching with Style: A Practical Guide to Enhancing Learning by Understanding Teaching and Learning Styles ( 1996), Anthony Grasha demonstrates that the Perry and Belenky et al. models are quite compatible. Although based on research conducted with decidedly different study populations, yet using the similar research protocol of in-depth interviews, both models posit three common stages of cognitive and moral development: dualism/received knowledge, "seeking the "right" point of view"; multiplism/subjective knowledge, "developing multiple points of view"; relativism/procedural knowledge, "using criteria to evaluate multiple points of view" David A. Kolb book Experiential Learning: Experience as The Source of Learning and Development ( 1984) presents a model of learning that attempts to categorize the learning styles that students prefer to use; it also can provide fluidity to the (sometimes interpreted as rigid) stage models of development presented in the preceding models. Meaningful learning, Kolb argues, is a series of events that integrates feeling, perceiving, thinking and acting, and consists of four phases that learners cycle through: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. The full description of the learning cycle presented in this model is quite complex; however, that surface complexity belies the model's pedagogical usefulness. Nilson's summary of this cycles provides a particularly useful distillation of Kolb's model. She writes: The concrete experience mode is characterized by a reliance more on feeling than on thinking to solve problems. In this mode, people interpret human situations in a very personal way and focus on the tangible here and now. Intuitive, open-minded, social, and artistic in their information processing, these learners center on knowledge that demonstrates the complex and the unique vs. the systematic, scientifically derived theories and generalizations. The reflective observation mode is similarly marked by intuitive thinking, but as applied to observing and understanding situations, not solving and manipulating them. Using this mode, a learner is quick to grasp the meanings and implications of ideas and situations and can examine situations and phenomena "empathetically" from different points of view. Patience, objectivity, and good judgement flourish in this mode. Reliance on logical thinking and conceptual reasoning characterizes the abstract conceptualization mode. It focuses on theory building, systematic planning, manipulation of abstract symbols, and quantitative analysis. This mode can generate personality traits such as precision, discipline, rigor, and an appreciation for elegant, parsimonious models. Finally, the active experimentation mode is directed towards the practical and concrete and rational thinking. But its orientation is towards results: influencing people's opinions, changing situations, and getting things accomplished--purely pragmatic applications. This mode fosters strong organizational skills, goal-direction, and considerable tolerance for risk. For the purposes of college-level writing instruction, the frameworks presented by Perry, by Belenky et al., and by Kolb should warrant careful consideration. The vast majority of the students taking required writing courses are in the earliest stages of their post-secondary education and research findings from studies of first- and second- year college students argue strongly that most of these students operate almost exclusively within a dualist/received knowledge model of knowledge ( Grasha219). These are students who fundamentally believe that Truth is available unconditionally and that the teacher's job is to give them the answers/knowledge they need to bring closure to their current task of completing a course. These are students who value structure in their learning environments combined with clear explanations of what they are to do in the activities they will take part in ( Miller, Groccia and Wilkes).Often, however, the writing courses they take have course objectives that state that for students to succeed in the course, they need to be much further along than they probably are in their cognitive development. In Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain) ( 1956) Benjamin Bloom and colleagues present a taxonomy of six levels of critical thinking that many educators find provides a useful framework for illustrating the mismatch that often exists between where college students are in their cognitive ability and what they are asked to demonstrate the ability to do in their courses. This hierarchical taxonomy presents six levels of thought that increase in complexity: | | (most complex) evaluation | | | synthesis | | | analysis | | | application | | | comprehension | | | (least complex) knowledge (recall) |
Students who view the world and knowledge using Perry's and Belenky's dualistic/received knowledge frames of reference are most comfortable and effective when working in the two least complex levels of thinking, knowledge/recall and application. They can easily call up "correct" answers to straightforward questions and apply a prescribed formula to given situations. The agendas that fuel writing programs with a cultural studies influenced focus of engaging close reading and critique of ideological cultural frameworks, for example, often encounter stiff student resistance, admittedly because they intentionally challenge these students' ideologically determined frames of reference. However, student resistance is also a by-product of course objectives that ask students to make rapid, possibly unrealistic cognitive and ethical growth. It is not too much of a stretch (and I put the bull's eye on my forehead first) to suggest that many composition teachers ask students to work effectively at the upper reaches of Bloom's taxonomy (synthesis and evaluation) without providing students the overt explanation they need to understand what's going on and what's expected of them, or providing them the structured and carefully crafted support they need to move from one "way of knowing" to another. More to the point that I am making in this chapter about the need for composition program planners to focus on how students learn and what types of support and structure best assist students in achieving the levels of intellectual development that are implicit in most writing sequences, in "Thinking and Writing: A Sequential Curriculum for Composition," one of the few articles to directly address the issue of applications of Bloom's taxonomy to teaching college composition, Karen Spear writes that The research on cognitive development in young adults makes a strong case for the cognitive needs of college writers, needs that have probably never been marginally satisfied or perhaps considered in designing and organizing writing courses. Bloom's taxonomy provides one model of thought structures and their relationships; there are others. Their value lies in evoking questions about cognitive sequences, about the effect of a curriculum in stimulating development, and about alternative curriculum designs. Given the methods through which many post-expressivist/social constructivist influenced composition theories seem to be enacted in the college writing classroom, one would think the theories themselves are predicated on the assumption that most undergraduate students are not firmly egocentric in their worldview, that they are not extremely uncomfortable in the face of ambiguity, and that they are facile playing with (and recognizing the presence of) the types of higher-order thinking that their teachers value, are comfortable with themselves, and have as (unstated) goals for their writing courses. Student demographic data challenge these assumptions, although not the overall educational outcomes aimed at by these projects. Available data about the intellectual and ethical development of traditional undergraduates (such as that glossed above) argue persuasively that it is probably unrealistic for composition programs to claim to achieve the higher-order critical gains they frequently advertise with typical undergraduate populations within the framework of traditional course schedules (ten to sixteen weeks of instruction). Such gains probably only stand a chance of being realized in carefully constructed, closely administered WAC-based writing programs in which direct writing instruction spans years, not weeks. Programmatic success in this context requires a phenomenal amount of commitment on the parts of teachers and students. Given staffing and support patterns for writing courses in most postsecondary institutions (heavy reliance on nonfaculty teaching staff who receive little sustained training, oversight, or the financial security and resources to encourage innovation), the teachers' side of the equation will rarely balance. Given the students' lack of tolerance for the types of (perceived) ambiguity in most writing classes, it is doubtful that this side of the equation will balance either. 8 The individual writing courses, as well as the overall composition curricula that many "corrective" composition agendas endorse are suited better--a better developmental "fit"--for nontraditional/mature undergraduates, upper-division undergraduates, and graduate students than for most lowerdivision undergraduates. As Spear notes, "From a cognitive perspective, most writing instruction in higher education is consistent with that in secondary education: what Stephen Judy described as 'Advanced Hodgepodge' in the high school gives way to 'Arrogant Hodgepodge' in college" PERSONALITY PROFILES AND LEARNING PREFERENCES Just as the works of Perry, Kolb, and Belenky et al. provide a revealing portrait of the stages of intellectual development that traditional undergraduate students progress through on their way to cognitive maturity, there exists a substantial body of research into the personality differences that students exhibit and the implications of such difference for teaching and learning.The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is one of the most widely recognized and implemented personality style inventories and it has been used extensively in education circles for the past two decades. Working from Carl Jung's theory of psychological "types" ( Myers and Myers, Lawrence), a model that explains how people take in information and make decisions, MBTI uses an extensive questionnaire to chart an individual's preferences in each of four binary domains: Sources of energy/Interaction with the outside worldExtraversion: Attitudes and interests oriented toward the external world of actions, people, objects, and events. Introversion: Inner subjective orientation toward life. Attitudes and interests are directed toward concepts, ideas, theories, and modes of reality. Information gathering/Perceptive processesSensing: Obtaining information from sensory input associated with the immediate, real, and practical facts of experience and everyday life. Intuition: Gathering information by going beyond the immediate experiences of life to consider possibilities, probabilities, and other aspects of people, objects, relationships, and events that are not immediately available to our senses. JudgmentThinking: Becoming objective, impersonal, logical, looking for causes of events, and the pros and cons of various approaches. Feeling: Subjectively and personally weighing the values of choices and how points of view and decisions affect other people. Style of livingJudgment: Living in a decisive, planned, and orderly manner with strong needs to regulate and control events. Perception: Living in a spontaneous, flexible manner, aiming to understand life and to adapt to the changes that occur in as efficient a manner as possible. ( Grasha24) From the pairs within the four domains are derived sixteen possible types that represent an individual's preferred way of doing things. Although everyone will use strategies that are more closely associated with type preferences other than the four considered dominant for them, particularly as they mature and work from greater stores of life experiences, we retain a preference for particular ways of interacting with the world, ideas, and other people. MBTI has received more attention in composition studies than have other lines of research into personality or learning styles (although that attention itself can hardly be described as overwhelming). 9 The most thorough, research-based, and well-received discussion of how MBTI can apply to the teaching of writing is Personality and the Teaching of Composition by George H. Jensen and John K. DiTiberio . 10 In addition to providing an introduction to Jung's psychological theories, a careful review of the history of the MBTI's development, and a detailed accounting of the eight personality dimensions covered by the MBTI, Jensen and DiTiberio draw clear connections between different type preferences and the writing processes that individuals with specific preferences most often rely on. Their analysis of type-specific composing strategies and overall composing processes attracted much attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Their analysis helped to explain many of the frustrations writing teachers faced working with the wide range of students found in developmental and first-year composition courses and it also elided well with emerging research on such issues as writer's block and rhythms of the composing process. A look at the composition community's literature, however, demonstrates that available information about personality type preferences and the connections that have been drawn to writer's composing processes has not achieved wide integration into the discipline's discussions about writing in general and its teaching or the implications that such information carries for new teacher training and for ongoing faculty and curricular development. In addition to the negligible coverage of issues related to cognitive development and personality types in the composition community's most prestigious journals, these issues get almost no mention in the most frequently adopted texts used in the training of composition teachers. The following five books (some newer than others) are ones that I have encountered in a large number of composition teacher training programs: Training the New Teacher of Composition; The St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing; Rhetoric and Composition: A Sourcebook for Teachers and Writers; Nuts and Bolts: A Practical Guide to Teaching College Composition; and The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook. Spanning a period from 1981 to 1993, a time of almost frenetic activity in the development of composition theory and methodology, these books offer a revealing angle into the themes dominating the discipline's discussions. Only one of the five, Graves Rhetoric and Composition, devotes any space to discussions of how students learn within a cognitive framework or to the presence of personality type and learning style preferences in the academic performance of writers. These two articles are reprinted versions of arguments made elsewhere, and thus do not add much weight of discussions about these issues and their consideration in the design of writing curricula, in the teaching of writing, or in the training of writing teachers. The reasons for the absence of strong application of the findings from the personality type research in the typical composition sequence are many, and they range from absence due to ignorance, to absence based on daunting logistical hurdles. MBTI, although the most popular and widely used of several available personality type indicators, is quite a complex tool and comes in several administration forms (e.g., a short form and a standard form). This inventory is also proprietary property: programs that wish to use the inventory must work through copyright holders to have a local administrator properly trained and certified in the inventory's administration, scoring, and interpretation; copies of the inventory must also be purchased through the copyright holder's publisher/agent. For large composition programs and for smaller ones also, instructional or faculty support budgets cannot absorb these costs. Successful use of the inventory is further complicated by the tendency of many inventory administrators and inventory takers either to oversimplify or reify the inventory results. The personality profiles generated by MBTI are metaphors, not yardsticks; however, these profiles are frequently discussed and applied to teaching situations as givens, and doing so dilutes their effectiveness in helping teachers and students develop a shared understanding and language for discussing and anticipating individuals' responses to different types of situations and activities. One of the most useful findings to emerge from MBTI-based research is in the dissimilarities that exist between students and their teachers. In terms of their dominant personality types, most faculty interact with the world, information, and others in ways that are quite different from how most of the population do. Summarizing data from a number of studies of type profiles among academic populations, Grasha, like Lawrence, shows that faculty exhibit a disproportionate preference for introversion and intuition in relation to their students and the general population (43): | | Faculty | Students | | Extraverted | 46% | 70% | | Introverted | 54% | 30% | | Sensing | 36% | 70% | | Intuitive | 64% | 30% |
In articulating the implications of these differences for how teachers and students interact in the classroom, Grasha writes, I typically find that the discrepancies between faculty and their students on the dimension of introversion and intuition are particularly problematic for faculty . . . .[C]ompared to the average college student, college faculty are overrepresented on these two types. In effect faculty interests and energy are largely captured by the inner world of ideas and they are more willing to consider possibilities for things that are not immediately apparent or available to the senses. Most college teachers also have the capacity to formulate hypotheses, to anticipate expected outcomes, and to formulate the implications of existing ideas and data from their disciplines. While such qualities are ideal for scholarship, they often clash with the more extraverted and sensing qualities of students. Unlike many of their instructors, most students get their energy from the world of people, objects and events. They prefer to see, touch, and feel things in order to gather information. Their orientation is more to the hands-on experiences and the practical implications of issues. Theoretical concerns and analysis is not typically one of their strong points. 11 Thus when faculty become excited about theoretical and conceptual issues, most students are looking for concrete and clear examples of terms and concepts. While some faculty may be satisfied with a rich verbal description of a point, many students want to see, hear, or touch something that is a representation of the conceptual point. When teachers become too theoretical and conceptual, the majority of their students are often lost. Deep intellectual analysis is not their strong suit. In a nutshell, the research on differences exhibited between teachers and students suggests that, more often than not, classroom activities that make perfect sense to teachers can easily be interpreted by students in almost diametrically opposite ways ( Lawrence; Jensen and DiTiberio). PRAGMATIC RESPONSE TO LEARNING STYLE AND PERSONALITY TYPE DIVERSITY A more accessible inventory than MBTI is the VARK learning styles inventory, developed by New Zealand educators Neil Fleming and Colleen Mills ( 1992). Rather than focus on personality preferences as a means of gaining insight on how students prefer to learn, Fleming and Mills focused on the "sensory modalities as a learning style dimension" . Their sensory-based learning styles model, VARK, derives it name from the following four "perceptual modes" that individuals gravitate toward as they deal with day-today activities and with formal learning situations: Visual: preference for graphical and symbolic ways of representing information. Aural: preference for "hear" information. Read/Write: preference for information printed as words. Kinesthetic: preference for the use of experience and practice (simulated or real). This inventory is much more accessible than MBTI is. The "How Do I Learn Best" questionnaire consists of thirteen items, is easily self-scored, and requires little to no administrative training. The strategies presented for helping teachers understand how their learning style preferences influence their choice of teaching activities are straightforward and intuitively appealing. The same can be said for the guides for students that provide strategies for note taking, study activities, and exam preparation. Additionally, the tool is free and easily obtained. Where Fleming and Mills differ from educators like Jensen and DiTiberio and other proponents of MBTI for instructional planning is in their pragmatic response to the real issue of the daunting number of different learning style preferences a teacher can expect to encounter in any given group of students. While they believe, like Grasha and Nilson, that teachers should accommodate students' learning styles somewhat in each course they teach, Fleming and Mills are realistic enough to know that students cannot count on such altruism as a matter of course. Explaining the observations that led them to develop the VARK inventory and its attendant support materials for students, they write: If we assume that the matching of presentational style and learner styles is a desirable objective, teachers face an incredibly demanding task. The range of style dimensions and therefore the combinations that might occur in one particular student group are likely to be so extensive that teachers are unable to extend their repertoire of teaching methods toencompass all of them. . . . [I]t is simply not realistic to expect teachers to provide programs that accommodate the learning style diversity present in their classes, even if they can establish the nature and extent of that diversity. We have come to the conclusion that the most realistic approach to the accommodation of learning styles in teaching programs should involve empowering students through knowledge of their own learning styles to adjust their learning behavior to the learning programs they encounter. THE OUTLOOK FOR POST-SECONDARY WRITING INSTRUCTION By this point, it should be clear that it is no easy task to create writing sequences that take into careful consideration where each student enters the course stream as learners, how they prefer to learn and to interact with the world and others, and how the courses we offer to them can be structured to ensure that these students achieve levels of development on target with course and curricular goals. Yes, in the brave new world of writing instruction, all writing courses would be created and taught in a multimodal manner, with the entire sequence choreographed to support students' cognitive development while also making instruction methods commensurate with as many separate learning styles and personality profiles as possible. I am not holding my breath till this particular wind of change blows through the composition community, however. Like Fleming and Mills, I do not expect to see most composition faculty extending themselves in this manner, particularly given that historical precedence does not bode well for a sudden raise in interest about student learning processes among the members of the composition community who most often chart the course that the community's discussions will take. And so, it is tempting to assuage the guilt that results from not doing all that we might do as concerned and informed educators by reaching for the VARK learning styles inventory, including it in the writing course's first-day activities, and congratulating ourselves for the accommodation we have shown to our students. This is certainly a less demanding commitment than trying to use MBTI or Kolb's learning cycles as a foundation for a writing course, or developing assignment sequences and instructional activities that intersect smoothly with the variety of all students' learning preferences. Yet composition is such an odd duck swimming in the academic course pond that Fleming and Mill's pragmatic strategy of helping students deal with dissonance between the ways that they prefer to intake and process information and the ways that many teachers structure their presentation of course material does not offer writing teachers the easy rhetorical out that it offers faculty in other disciplines. Fleming and Mills notetaking, study, and exam strategies work best in courses that have the defined course "content" and regular tests that many writing courses do not. These aids are crafted within the overriding gestalt of the traditional lecture/discussion-based, content-based curriculum. And so, we are back where we started, faced with several unappealing choices. As I see it, writing teachers have three choices for reacting to what is known about the cognitive development patterns, learning and personality profiles typically found among lower-division undergraduate students: do nothing, dive in, change the course outcomes. Option 1: Do Nothing Given the inertia that defines academe, Option 1 is the most likely choice, although it will most likely be dressed up in the language of deflection of responsibility, "We can't do that because the institution won't fund it," and so on. We will probably cling to this choice until calls for accountability and programmatic assessment get too intense to ignore, until funding for curricular programs is tied to meaningful outcomes assessment, or until internal and external stakeholders mandate some combination of the two. At that point, we can all raise our voices in moral indignation and decry the injustice of whatever system is imposed on us and our programs. The other two choices offer more complex alternatives and, regardless how unlikely it is that either will surface as the course of action chosen by the composition community, each warrants a bit of speculation about its merits, shortcomings, and logistics. Option 2. Dive In: Put the Best Available Information Into Practice It might seem natural that given the composition community's long-standing sales pitch that this is a community more concerned about student growth than other disciplinary communities we would be willing to jump in and create curricula and courses that strive to put into practice material along the lines of that presented in this chapter. I doubt such action will happen, however. The project would be a massive undertaking for one thing. It would also disrupt comfortable academic routines. Specifically, to strive for the goal of creating a multimodal learning environment in each writing course on a campus, a number of thorny, currently unresolved issues must be addressed. None of these issues is new. Yet they are ones that the composition community has not been successful in resolving, even in the face of continuing advocacy for change coming from the grassroots and national organizational levels. Staffing: Many writing programs are of a size that they must offer anywhere from thirty to 200+ sections of just first-year writing courses each term. Such course demands mean that these programs need anywhere from ten to 75 teachers to adequately staff these classes. To date, in many programs these teachers are members of a peripatetic part-time, adjunct, graduate student pool. However, constancy of one's teaching staff is a necessity for a program that tries to institute a curriculum that strives to meet the individualized learning needs of each student enrolled. This need for a stable, full-time teaching staff is not only pedagogically and programmatically desirable, it is also an economic necessity. Faculty Training and Ongoing Development: Because of the novelty of this approach to teaching, an extensive and ongoing training program is needed to educate current faculty in the methods advocated by the available research on student learning, but also to continually educate needed replacement faculty and to re-educate and refocus continuously. Such activity is never cheap and a stable instructional force will be one of the key elements in making the overall program, as described, cost effective--even before considering the types of salary and benefits adjustments needed to stabilize this labor pool. One other issue that will come to the forefront during workshops and seminars about students' learning cycles is the time needed for most individuals to make cognitive gains of the kind implied in most writing courses. Course Placement and Time Lines: The ten- week quarter and the sixteenweek semester are not ideal time frames within which to make substantive cognitive growth, particularly when one's attention is spread thin between four or five competing academic demands--not to mention nonacademic demands. Realistically, upper-division students are better prepared cognitively to achieve with many of the course outcomes found in many writing courses. They are better able to analyze complex arguments and situations, synthesize responses to them, and to be able to justify and articulate the validity of their choices than are first-year students. Therefore, one option is to move the writing courses into later years of the curriculum. Doing so, however, would be a disadvantage to lower-division students who do benefit from the cognitive push they feel in writing classes and so another option to explore is taking the writing course out of the standard academic term boundaries and making written competence an exit ability outcome of the student's entire educational experience, spreading instruction across every step of the curriculum. The Writing Center: Actually, a logical model for achieving a highly individualized learning environment designed to meet the specific needs of students at every step of their development as learners and writers exists in the form of writing center pedagogy. By working with students through their entire post-secondary experience, writing center staff could almost guarantee that demonstrable gains would be made--assuming of course that students share the desire to achieve those gains and are willing to work in the comparatively unstructured situation of the one-to-one or small-group tutorial. Working in this type of setup, students' entry-level learning styles, personality profiles, and levels of cognitive development could be assessed, learning goals and schedules established, and achievement of learning outcomes demonstrated. However, such a program, even on small campuses, would be expensive (not to mention the extent to which its existence would force college registrars and other administrators to think outside the familiar box of the academic term). For all the reasons stated above, and for others as yet unarticulated, I cannot see the needed critical mass of compositionists opting for this plan anytime soon. Thus, there remains one other option to consider. Option 3: Revise the Course and Program Outcomes for College-Level Composition Sequences Although this third option might strike any number of writing teachers as unthinkable, I disagree. Rather, I think that revising the goals for the writing course, restating the course outcomes to reflect learning gains that can be achieved with the large majority of students in the tight confines of the academic term, is an honest response to a less-than-desirable situation that has been allowed to run unchecked for too long. Most writing classes--even entire writing programs--rarely state clearly the outcomes for the course and then match the course structure, assignment, and texts for the achievement of those outcomes. Most of the statements that pass for outcome measures for these courses are global, vague, poorly defined, unrealistic statements along the lines of making students critically engaged thinkers and adept manipulators of academic prose. In reality, when working with lower-division students who see the world in blackand-white terms, who view the teacher as the sole voice of authority, and who probably interact with information and experiences in decidedly different ways from the teacher, the honest and achievable course goals are to try to get students somewhat comfortable with the reality of ambiguity in the world, somewhat adept at summarizing and analyzing texts and arguments, and aware of their ability to accurately self-assess the larger elements that define the strengths and weaknesses of their written communicative activities. While these goals are attainable in a fifteen-week semester--as long as everyone works hard--they are not glamorous. Nor are they all that mysterious and evocative: the goods they promise to deliver are rather mundane, especially compared to the tenor of the previous promises about the results of college-level writing courses on student learning. I believe too that many compositionists will consider course outcomes such at these too low a goal for a college-level writing course? Yet, if we come back to the issue of where do our students come into these writing courses as learners, then consider how are they likely to go about learning in these courses, and finally assess how much time it will take for most of them to demonstrate proficiency with the types of performances we choose to use as evaluation instruments, these goals gain some redemption. Composition as a required part of a college education is not going to disappear. However, it should, and can, be more honest to its many stakeholders than it has been historically. Our community has often colluded with our institutions and the larger culture to hold out the writing sequence as the key to academic success and social mobility, even when we put students in courses whose structure, instructors, and activities offer beneficial learning environments for a proportionately small number of these very students. The ultimate redemption for college writing courses and programs will not be found in some yet-to-be-found new theory or paradigm but, rather when these courses deliver on their promises and each student is afforded the same opportunity to develop as a thinker, individual, and a writer. That is a type of redemption to which the composition community should strive. NOTES 1. An argument in a similar vein is made by Kate Ronald and Jon Volkmer in their JAC article "Another Competing Theory of Process: The Student's." They ask "researchers and teachers of composition to resist elevating writing instruction to some lofty abstract perch and to pay attention to the context of students' lives as they write and learn" (84). 2. Henson and Borthwick ( 1984) review long-standing assumptions about student performance as indicators of intelligence and note a surprising change in study findings. They question the findings of influential studies early in the century that indicated that student achievement correlated with intelligence because these studies were structured so that "all students were given the same type of instruction and the same amount of time to learn" (4). When the question of performance and intelligence was seriously reconsidered later in the century, in studies in which students had unlimited time to learn and were exposed to many types of teaching, results differed markedly. "Under these conditions the findings were totally different. . . . given the time and the correct teaching methods almost any students can learn or master the material set before them" (4). Like other researchers, Henson and Borthwick see "that individual learners have their own preferred learning styles and that teachers have some responsibility for gearing up their teaching style to 'fit' the preferred learning style of the learners" (4). 3. For widely cited summaries of this process, see Berlin, Rhetoric and Reality, and Faigley, "Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal." 4. College English and College Composition and Communication, the field's flagship journals, have printed nothing dealing directly with individuals' learning styles and personality preferences, or their cognitive or intellectual development within the past decade. The Journal of Advanced Composition has printed two articles that apply, one in 1983, the other in 1989. To find more discussion of these issues within the context of college-level writing instruction, one must look to more outlying, fringe journals such as JAEPL: Journal of the Association of Expanded Perspectives on Learning, Writing Center Journal, Writing Lab Newsletter, and Writing on the Edge. 5. Although rightly critiqued for the less-than-representative nature of his initial study population (all white males from affluent East Coast backgrounds), Perry's findings have held up to repeated replication studies. 6. For accessible syntheses of Perry's model, see Grasha 1996 and Nilson 1998. 7. Belenky et al. is widely cited in the composition literature; however, among those articles drawing on this research, few use the developmental model presented to articulate instructional scaffolding beyond advocating the use of collaborative situations as fitting in well with women's needs for consensus building, or for presenting nonargumentative writing tasks as allowing women space to express themselves in nonaggressive, decidedly masculine discourse patterns. Carol Gilligan's work is similarly thinly applied in the composition literature, when it is used. 8. Add to this equation the dissonance that lower-division college students perceive between the obvious levels of ambiguity they deal with in their writing classes and the seeming certainty presented in other introductory courses across the curriculum and it is easy to see why students who operate largely from a dualist world view can easily discount much of the "instruction" they face in the composition course. 9. Noted art education scholar and teacher educator Janet L. Olson ( 1992) reports that in most elementary, middle, and secondary school classrooms, one will find four basic types of students, each type representing approximately 25 percent of the class. They can be described as follows: A. High visual and high verbal skills; B. High visual and low verbal skills; C. Low visual and high verbal skills; and D. Low visual and low verbal skills. (45) Her work stresses the need to link visual and verbal instruction if teachers are to help all students develop the range of communication and problem-solving skills they need in order to succeed in today's information-rich economy and culture. 10. Other books and articles about MBTI use in teaching writing exist; many of them are more recent than Personality and the Teaching of Composition. Such useful book as Writing and Personality: Finding Your Voice, Your Style, and Your Way, by DiTiberio and Jensen, and Tom Thompson edited collection, Most Excellent Differences: Essays on Using Type Theory in the English Classroom, have received no attention in the mainstream composition literature. 11. The "not" in this sentence was inadvertently deleted in the published text. I have replaced the missing word in my quotation with the author's permission.
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