Janice Witherspoon Neuleib and Maurice Scharton

Have computer classrooms become an obstacle to the new pedagogies of English studies? If new graduate teaching assistants and junior faculty have "post process" ideas about writing courses, should programs move writing out of the computer classroom to accommodate innovation? Granted, the intellectual politics of English studies programs no longer foregrunds the discussion of writing processes that became the core of writing classes by the eighties. More humanistic pursuits, such as rhetoric, politics, and the philosophy of language have become the staple of discussion, and many writing programs have broadened their focus to encompass the interdisciplinary English studies model. Nevertheless, neither people nor their writing processes--if we may use those terms foundtionally for a moment--have changed since the 1980. Whatever media people work in, they still have to invent ideas, consider an audience, find language and form for their ideas, and revise the resultant unruly discourse to impose control over it. In consequence, many of the important values in a writing class have not changed. Controlling a sentence still matters, as do writing a paragraph, finding a reader, and listening to an editor. Experienced teachers-researchers, who themselves have seen many pieces of writing through to publication, know the details of handling those issues in a way that beginners who have written only for school have yet to experience. Quite conceivably, someone experienced in teaching and writing could employ any pedagogy to address a fundamental writing issue such as revision, but it is not reasonable to believe that every graduate student and junior faculty member can accomplish the same end. Thus, some form of infrastructure is required to keep new teachers on task or writing instruction itself might disappear from composition courses ( Neuleib, "Revision"). The "limitations" of a computer classroom in fact represent the discipline of writing, and the struggles that students and teachers experience in accommodating their ideas to the status quo are evidence that the system is working.

THE IDEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF PHYSICAL SPACE

A classroom's physical layout signals some of the teacher's pedagogical assumptions. Given the ways that space controls interactions, it might be said that the classroom's configuration presents an argument about pedagogy, an argument that most students know how to read. Students know that rows of desks facing the blackboard signify a teacher's intention to pursue a lecture mode while desks in circles signify discussion, and long tables are meant to invite the collegiality of a seminar. Given the academic cultural assumptions about the space, clever or contrarian teachers can manipulate a classroom's configuration for effect. By choosing, for example, to lecture to a group sitting in a circle, the teacher can command more attentiveness. By setting up small groups and then joining one of them, the teacher can confer and withhold privilege. Both teacher and student are accustomed to the fact that the physical configuration literally establishes the grounds for their interaction. The space is protean, capable of being reconfigured to suit a number of purposes.

If all classrooms present assumptions that may be called arguments, computer rooms present a pedagogical argument that is in some ways irrefutable. For example, the computer rooms at Illinois State University argue for keeping the social units simple. In each of nine small computer rooms, eighteen to twentythree students sit at computers placed on wall-mounted tables, not individual desks. Thus, primary attention is focused on the screen and secondary attention on the person at the next computer. Swivel chairs with casters make small groups feasible but awkward since a small group cannot effectively huddle over a single computer. Whole group discussion or lecture is difficult to sustain for more than a few minutes because the students must turn away from the computer and balance a notebook on a knee to take notes. Thus, an adaptive response to working in these rooms is for teachers to prefer writing to discussion, tutoring or collaboration to small group work, and group work to lectures. The syllabus for full-time work in these rooms naturally stresses drafting and revision with a tutorial emphasis.

AN ELITIST VIEW OF TIME

If the classroom argues for a pedagogy, the pedagogy must emerge from an ideology, and in this case it is one whose fundamental value is competence with language, particularly with the importance of learning to revise. Early studies like Shaughnessy Errors and Expectations, Summers "Revision Strategies," Emig Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, and Faigley and Witte "Analyzing Revision" and others of their era framed the research agenda of composition with the idealistic assumption that people who were not of the socioeconomic brackets that had traditionally attended college could be shown how to produce writing that met the standards of academe ( Brandt, Berthoff, Brannon, Emig, Faigley, Perl, Summers). Since those days, the very notion of competence has been subject to vigorous challenge in debates about testing, cultural difference, gender, and postmodern language philosophy. The senior faculty who constructed writing pedagogy and built the infrastructure to deliver it find that the poles of academic politics have shifted so that we are now the conservative forces. We have become the memory of a culture that has elected to move social justice and ideological purity ahead of competence and disciplinarity on its agenda ( Bartholomae, Brodkey). We remember the struggles to move composition away from the literary mold in order to establish an identity for the field and to give some respectability to the enterprise of teaching people to write. We recall the moment when it was clear that we had won, that we had intellectual independence, better job prospects, and a set of problems far more interesting than those that literary study could present. We remember that we built the computer classrooms to focus attention on drafting and revision ( Bruns, Fennick, Fortune, Scharton) and that the computer classroom became the infrastructure for a pedagogy of revision.

Although process pedagogy was idealistic, it was never liberal or egalitarian. The precise social inverse of the collectivist pedagogies that currently obtain in English studies, process pedagogy was anticipated by and in some instances borrowed from the Oxford dons who tutored the children of Britain's social elite ( Gere and LeFevre). The basic premise of the Oxford tutorial method is to lavish resources on each student. It is extremely expensive to pay a highly educated person to listen to a student read a paper, to take each word of the paper seriously, to question meaning and appropriateness, and thereby to guide the student to produce more and more disciplined prose. Assuming that bright, committed students from various backgrounds were worth and could profit from that sort of attention constituted the idealism of proces's pedagogy. Building expensive computer classrooms in which to pursue individual, process-oriented instruction gave material form to that idealistic impulse and a vantage point from which to defend the ground composition gained in the sixties and the seventies.

In the nineties, writing courses at Illinois State University have continuously included perspectives and approaches that incorporate current research and evoke new thinking. The introductory course reiterates the received wisdom that students should read, write, revise, and create portfolios of their work. The goals for the course stress critical thinking and critical review of professional and student texts. It also asks students to perform a certain amount of meta-analysis of their own writing experiences. Graduate students who teach writing experience a variety of types of careful training, including week-long orientation sessions and a semester-long course that directs and coordinates new instructors' stints as co-teachers with experienced graduate instructors and as tutors in the learning center. These instructors also take a course in composition theory and research during the first semester and spend time visiting experienced teachers' classes, often those of their designated program assistants, experienced doctoral students who each attend to a group of six or seven new graduate instructors. This program receives constant personal attention from the Assistant Director of Writing and advanced doctoral students from the composition and rhetoric program, and also constant but less personal administrative attention from the Director of Writing Programs and the Coordinator of Writing Assessment.

PROBLEMS ON THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM

Of course, the graduate students and junior faculty who enter the teaching profession through the narrow straits of computer classrooms lack the memory of what computers represent to composition studies. To many of these instructors, political argument and ideological experimentation have a retro appeal, a hearkening to an era of social change, civil action, and educational reform that preceded the crass realities of Reagan's economics and Bush's militarism. The interdiscplinary eclecticism common to English graduate programs, particularly on the literature side, seems to some junior teachers to license experimentation in the classroom. Those who are relatively new to English may not notice that interdisciplinarity implies the existence of disciplines, or suspect that cynicism and intellectual imperialism might be among the motivations to reintegrate the elements of English departments. To give a familiar example of the sort of problem created when inexperienced people teach writing, we can consider Freirean pedagogy. In the abstract, liberatory pedagogy has both practical and idealistic appeals. If students can be shown how to assume control over their own education, then they will be better prepared to earn a place in the world and to make a positive difference (Shor). Freireans argue that in the classroom students will take responsibility for their own ideas, perhaps even collaborate with the teacher to help ease some of the administrative, evaluative, and clerical burden. However, in the concrete reality of the writing classroom, liberatory pedagogy's romantic appeal to certain teachers can persuade them to spend their time in direct pursuit of ideological ends. Thus "post-process" often ends up meaning "post-writing instruction" as social and political issues absorb all class time and most teacher attention.

The most susceptible writing teachers flatter themselves that daily discussions of intellectual issues punctuated at intervals with e-mail exchanges and a position paper will serve as a writing course. The most charitable interpretation of writing classes in which discussion predominates is that for these teachers, teaching a student how to control a text can be assumed to be a consequence of urging a student to take a position. The problem with this sort of thinking is that in teaching practice means and ends become reversed. If a politicized teacher must choose whether to spend classtime talking idealistically about social ills, teaching the postmodern textual realities of webpage design, or working on the practical details of student writing, spending time on student writing is the third choice. (See the order of essay choices and the argument in NCTE's new Cross-Talk.) Although society's ultimate ends may be to promote social justice or the university's ends may be to produce new knowledge, it does not follow that those are the immediate ends of a writing course, nor does it follow that those ends can become the means of teaching people to produce competent writing.

A STORY

An anecdote from recent experience illustrates the slip twixt the cup and the lip. It was a November afternoon. The setting was a computer classroom area, a group of nine networked rooms in which writing classes were meeting. A graduate instructor teaching in her computer classroom decided to run next door to ask a fellow doctoral student a question. She found a classroom of composition students busily writing away on their computers but no fellow instructor. When asked where their teacher was at the moment, the class responded that they had not seen him for a week and a half. The instructor asked the class what they had been doing in class while the teacher was gone, and they responded that they had been writing their papers, reading them, and revising. The instructor raced upstairs to report a miracle; Peter Elbow's vision of writing without teachers had spontaneously appeared in the writing classroom. The Writing Program sent out a search party and eventually found that the missing instructor had suffered the mild form of nervous collapse often attendant upon enrollment in graduate school. Amidst the dismay at this turn of events, it was impossible not to take some satisfaction that the syllabus and classrooms were designed well enough to support writing instruction in the absence of a teacher.

Although the course can function in a teacher-free mode, it is not teacherproof, as the denouement of the anecdote will illustrate. Two advanced composition doctoral students, one our computer coordinator and the other an instructor on special assignment to the graduate director, took over the two orphan classes. These two had twelve days to decide on grades, but the portfolio requirements provided all the evidence an experienced instructor would need to assign grades. The portfolio requires six papers with all drafts, all teacher and peer suggestions for revision, a paper from another class with a discussion of its context, and a reflective essay that discusses how revision suggestions were used to revise the papers. Particularly important to grading, the reflective essay tells much about the nature of a student's progress in the class because unless the students understands the nature of revision, the reflective essay is impossible to write. These two advanced doctoral students, who were given the task of "finishing off" and giving grades in the orphan classes, both asked the writing program director what they should do about giving grades without the full experience of having taught the class for the entire semester. In response to the explanation that they could understand the nature of the class and of each student's experience from the reflective essay, both quickly said, "Oh yeah." Their confused and defensive responses suggested that even advanced standing in a graduate composition program had not equipped these teachers to draw what seemed to be an obvious pedagogical inference from the design of portfolios--that grades could be based on the written record, not their experience of class discussions.

A FEW FACTS

Some more empirical evidence supports the unhappy conclusion we draw from the anecdote. This evidence is drawn from student and instructor responses to the English Placement Test (freshman year) and the University Writing Examination Ounior or senior year) at Illinois State University. In addition to the conventional holistically scored writing samples, both tests include a section that specifically prompts a writer to plan a second draft of the essay. Writers are required to "supply two good questions you would ask a reader to answer to help you improve the credibility of your essay," "rewrite two sentences from your essay to demonstrate how you might appeal to your reader's emotions," and "discuss ways you would plan to expand, rearrange, or shorten your essay." The second draft plan allows judges to estimate a writer's ability to evaluate and plan changes of a first draft. Before beginning the second-draft plan, students are prompted to demonstrate copy-editing skills by marking possible errors. With the popular concept of revision parsed to exclude copy-editing, student attention is thereby focused on changes in the form and content of the essay. Since students plan but are not required to execute revisions, students can offer suggestions from a lower level of certainty and commitment than would be required if the revisions were to be carried out. This allows for a greater range of freedom in imagining revisions.

The second-draft plans sort students who understand the nature of revision from those who do not. For example, say a student was responding to an essay on censorship of student newspapers. The student might write an essay that described a personal experience with censorship. Then in the revision section the student would ask a potential reader the appropriate (or inappropriate) questions. A useful reader question might be "In my second paragraph I discuss a fight with my high school principal over an article in our student newspaper; can you as a reader tell me about similar experiences so that I might enrich the essay with other perspectives?" Another useful request a writer might make of a reader could be "Please react to the importance of my experience by discussing whether you think my story is worth telling and why."

The exams are scored by three raters who use five-point scales in which five is the highest score. Two of the raters score the essay and the third scores only the second-draft plan. The rater who scores the second-draft plan uses a scoring guide that focuses attention on the specificity and strategic usefulness of the planned revisions, as the following excerpt from the scoring guide illustrates.

 Plans Receiving a 3 (Suggesting Competence)

Plans Receiving a 2 (Suggesting Incompetence)

Our strategy for teaching reader response to student (and professional) essays requires that all questions relate to the particular essay that the writer wants to improve. We found in our workshop that we had set a hard task not only for our students but also for our graduate instructors. We were asking them to apply standards for revision of the sort that professional journals set for reviewers.

When, in our capacities as reviewers in our field, we receive an essay or a book manuscript from a journal or publisher, the author or the editor has set specific questions about that particular text. We respond to those questions with answers meant to help the author revise the text, and we always have revision suggestions even when we suggest that an essay or book go to press. It is that criterion that we use when we set the standards for our student writers, and it is that standard that we expect from our graduate instructors. Unfortunately, such a skill in responding is hard to teach and equally hard to teach others to teach. Yet it is that skill that is the core of writing instruction ( Kutz and Roskelly).

ANOTHER STORY

The complexity of the problem goes beyond the graduate instructors, of course. Why can they not teach these skills? Another anecdote of slippage will help to illustrate the problem. During a summer workshop for faculty instructors, the writing program director remarked offhandedly that it does no good to write on a paper if the student will not be revising the paper. A business professor responded that his life and his marriage were often in great stress because he spent so much time marking papers. He said that he marked everything he could find. Asked when these papers were turned in during the semester, he said that he gave them until the last week to complete the papers. Asked, "So do they pick up these papers the next semester?" He said that they mostly didn't.

Months later, at a winter workshop, the same business professor thanked the writing director for changing his life. He said he no longer wrote on papers if students were unlikely to read his comments. Asked casually whether he read drafts of his students' papers and whether he made suggestions for change early on in the semester, he looked crestfallen. He had operationalized the information that his comments came too late as permission to cease commenting altogether. The obvious strategy, moving the comments earlier in the process, did not present itself to him because he could not see the paper-marking enterprise in the larger system of writing instruction. Too many graduate instructors have been taught by teachers like this very able and hard-working business professor. Thus, their construct of writing instruction is, at its core, having plenty of time to write their papers, turn them in at the end of the semester, and receive comments that have no practical consequences. The "obvious" response to comments without cons equences--revi sing a finished paper from one class to serve the requirements of another class--is viewed as immoral by many professors and departments.

Seeing individual pieces of revision advice as a cog in a much larger system and visualizing the teaching strategies implied by the system is easy only for the people who have designed, built, and experienced the system. New teachers who walk into a computer classroom fresh from a course in the postmodern novel or even a course in rhetorical theory are at any given moment probably operating from a completely different system, one in which they see themselves as public intellectuals or literary theorists or professors or graduate students in English studies: to those people at those moments, the machines are just machines and the course is only an introduction to something.