Cookbook Haiku

meandering thoughts

in digital space captured

yet recipes change

Moving the Five-Paragraph Essay Along – A Dream Assignment in Several Parts (Part 3)

Recap of Part 2

• Establish the parameters of “other” technologies. Will you have your students consider old and new technologies? Will they only be able to use digital technologies?
• After the students have developed a list of technologies that could be used to repurpose their essays, determine which ones you will explore as a group in class. Most will likely be digital, so you will need to familiarize yourself with a variety of software/freeware in order to develop blogs, websites, wordclouds, wikis, photo editors, social networks, and more.
• Have the students submit their repurposed essay, making it accessible for everyone in class.

Now that the students have written their essays and resubmitted them in a new genre and a new technology other than an essay printed in linear form on paper, have them reflect on why they chose that particular genre and technology. According to Stuart Selber in Multiliteracies, students should have not only functional computer literacy; they should also have critical and rhetorical literacy as related to technology. The students should be able to understand and participate in discourse related to computers.  They need to be cognizant of the dominant perspectives in technology. Finally, they need to realize that interacting with technology is a social action, not a just a technical action.

Regardless of the level of the course, students can learn some of these basic concepts through discussion of the different technologies. For instance, even if the student chooses an earlier technology like a chalkboard or a dip pen, the student can discuss the limiting nature of the technology and how it may have influenced choices in repurposing the essay. If a student chose a blog, they can discuss how their essay is now accessible for everyone with internet access. If the assignment is actually a five-paragraph assignment, the blog form may not change the text version very much, but other media can be included like links to the original work. All forms of technology could be used to explore the final category as well, rhetorical literacy. The students can discuss how they considered their audience as they were recreated their essay.

They may not understand Selber’s theories on every level (do any of us?), but they will start to learn to consider that organized thought present to others can take on many forms and these forms have possibilities and limitations.

 

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Moving the Five-Paragraph Essay Along – A Dream Assignment in Several Parts (Part 2)

Recap of Part 1

• Share works that are important to you and explain why.
• Use the works you have shared as examples for discussion to help the students learn how to “look” at their own works.
• Require the students to submit a short proposal regarding their selected work.
• Give students plenty of opportunity to break into their groups/pairs to discuss their works and develop their essays through prewriting tasks. Be sure to check in on every student during this time.
• Utilize your essay submission/revision process; however, in the meantime you will be exploring digital technologies as related to Part 2.

Now that you have done your duty, satisfied your department head, and taught your students how to properly pass an assessment, you and your students can have some fun and develop digital literacy. “As curators of academia, then, we can exploit the possibilities of our status, exposing students to a range of culturally valid forms as well as non-mainstream content; in doing so, we provide our audience with a host of possibilities for worlds and forms to inhabit” (Sirc 126). Even if you are the savviest user of technology, I guarantee there will be someone in your class who will know more about a technology at any moment. Be humble and be open to learning too. The idea with juxtaposing the five-paragraph essay with digital literacy is to validate other forms and communities of discourse.

Have the students brainstorm different digital technologies and communities. Encourage them to list the technologies they use frequently as well as others they don’t use at all. They should categorize them accordingly. At this point, for the purpose of your assignment, you can either decide to have them repurpose their five-paragraph essay into a form with which they are comfortable or a new form. You even might want to have them consider old forms of technology, like a chalkboards, dip pens or even embroidery. You may even want to explore some of these older technologies in class as well as newer digital technologies.

Again, you will want to require your students to write a short proposal on how they will repurpose their essay. Have them submit their project to you in their chosen format. Give them control over everything except the deadline.

Moving the Five-Paragraph Essay Along – A Dream Assignment in Several Parts (Part 1)

Despite its reputation for being trite, the five-paragraph essay is still a great starting point. It’s a goal to work toward. Obviously, we want our students to eventually move away from the formulaic five-paragraph essay and write more nuanced, voiced essays. Still, the five-paragraph essay teaches a few great things on form they can take anywhere (and I do mean anywhere) with them:

• The introduction – So often I find the students who write less developed or the shorter, four-paragraph essay do so because they haven’t written a great introduction. They start with the thesis of the essay and jump right into the supporting points.
• Supporting points – “But what if I only have two points to use for supporting detail?” How many of us have heard this question? I actually welcome it because it gives me a chance to explain how a writer may only actually have one really good supporting point but needs three paragraphs to convey the information clearly and convincingly.
• Conclusion – Somehow you knew this was coming, right? Exactly. This is exactly why we need them. I do wish we could get them to stop “restating the thesis” and instead teach them to say, what’s next in light of this new, great information.

The first part of this assignment calls for asking the students to write a five-paragraph (or so, as I like to tell them) essay on a short film, short story, poem, song, etc. You may want to limit the different genres to keep the assignment manageable. Provide a few examples in class to generate discussion. They can use the examples you provide, or you can offer to let them choose a different “work” and require them to submit it to you ahead of time so that you can familiarize yourself with the work. If you wait to get it after the fact as an attachment, you are not able to help them with the prewriting activities. Additionally, in order to help them create discourse on their chosen work, you may want to require that students pick another work only as a pair or small group.

When you first give the assignment watch and read the examples as a group. Instead of focusing the discussion on the works themselves, discuss why you picked these works. Talk about why they are important to you. (They must be significant; you felt compelled to share them.) Reflect aloud with them, openly and honestly. The idea is to help them discover a work that matters to them. At the end of this discussion, require them to free-write about the works you shared or other works they are considering using and why. They will use parts of this free-write when they submit a short proposal on the “work” they choose.

Juxtaposing the Essay

In “Box Logic,” Geoffrey Sirc asks the same question I have been asking myself throughout this term, “Is the essay still our central genre?”(111). With all of the different types of writing in the world today due to digital technology, how can we continue to think that the essay should be our focus in teaching college composition?

Unfortunately, we have to keep teaching the essay because it is what we use to assess students. It’s the benchmark. It’s like when we tell our students it’s okay to write a one-word sentence for emphasis. We tell them they can write that one-word sentence only if we know they are doing so for a good reason. And before we can know, they have to know. In other words, you can’t break the rules until you know the rules you are breaking and why you are breaking them.

But this is not to say that teaching types of writing other than the essay is breaking the rules. It is necessary. We owe it to our students to teach them other skills. Consider abstract art for a moment. Many people will see abstract art and claim that their kid could do better, but as abstract artist Chris Pagini claims:

“Drawing is an entirely separate skill; what is required for abstraction is a new way of thinking. As for the halfwit who might say their kid could do it, I say, bring it on! People make statements like this can’t produce, because while anyone including your no-talent kid can slather some color on paper, it still doesn’t meet the criteria of good art until it is arranged and juxtaposed so as to produce an appropriate mind effect.” (Abstract Paintings)

So like Sirc uses “box logic” based assignments to encourage his students to juxtapose ideas and concepts they might not have otherwise, we as teachers should teach writing in a way that juxtaposes different or less traditional genres with the essay. We cannot wait for our assessment method to change; we have to start teaching the difference now.

Summary: “The Thirty-Eight-or-So Five-Paragraph Essay (The Dagwood)” by Alfredao Celedon Lujan

Lujan discusses how the five-paragraph essay is what we teach and use to assess, but our texts use five-paragraph essays that are sometimes forty-two paragraphs long. From the time students walk into his class, Lujan reminds them their “paper has been in process their whole lives” (143) because as they are experiencing life they are developing their perspective, voice, and story.

Drawing on Vigotsky’s “zone of proximal development” (142) and a Dagwood, “multilayered sandwiches that Dagwood Bumstead, from the comic strip Blondie, was fond of” (149), Lujan proposes the student start by gathering the inside of a sandwich and build out from there. Much like White, Lujan believes that the five-paragraph essay does not promote creativity and reflection. Instead, the students feel compelled to follow a formula that they won’t necessarily use later.

This pastiche does not adhere to one genre. Yet, ultimately it still has a “middle (of course), beginning, and end” (153). This assignment requires the student to reflect on what they have written or considered before and how it fits now. Lujan even includes a sample pastiche that includes an introduction of the author, actual quiz questions and answers from the course, lyrics, reflective journal entries and more. Of course, there was also a short concluding paragraph to signal the end and summarize the semester’s work. Honestly, the pastiche seemed quite disjointed.

Summary: “My Five-Paragraph Theme Theme” by Edward M. White

Without citing literacy theory, White discusses how the five-paragraph essay stifles the development of writers. He concedes that the five-paragraph essay is a great way for students to develop some sort of organizational structure but with that comes a student applying a formula rather than truly writing, or more importantly, becoming a writer.

He suggests that we have students “spend some time with narrative structures that respond to assignments calling for telling about a personal experience and what it means to the writer—and, possibly, the reader” (140). Through this approach the student should then be able to indicate the reasons in a more compelling manner. Other writing strategies should be mastered and incorporated too such as compare/contrast because at least this strategy would force the writer to consider more than just getting a good grade through illustration.

White is not suggesting that we abandon the five-paragraph essay. Instead we should approach how we teach it for what it is, a way to pass essay tests. After mastering that, we need to teach them to be writers.

Summary: “College-Level Writing and the Liberal Arts Tradition” by Edward M. White

First, White acknowledges that college-level writing is sometimes and sometimes not happening in college. And sometimes it’s happening in high school. White challenges the readers of this book to truly consider “What characteristics clearly must be present in writing for us to call it college level?” (296). It’s not just or always in a college classroom.

He claims that college students “fail to write college-level papers because that they have nothing to say, particularly when they stand in the shadows of their sources” (296). In college, students are just learning how to use sources to support their ideas, so if they are not able to make assertions because they have not developed as writers, they fall back on what they did in high school: summarizing and/or plagiarizing.

Finally, White discusses how because high school learning is test-focused, writing assignments are more clear. When students finally get to college with college-writing rooted in liberal arts tradition, they are challenged to “move out of their comfort zone into new ways of thinking about complex matters” ( 298).

Incorporating Technology Interaction

Deciding to come back to graduate school to retake much of the same coursework for a second master’s degree wasn’t easy, but it is one of the best choices I have ever made. The last time I took this course, we broke into groups and using construction paper, scissors, and markers, we constructed a web page with links. In the end, the project looked like crude popup books, each group inventing their own way to illustrate how a link connects and opens. We were still marveling at how the Internet worked, but not really thinking about how we–and our students–worked with it.

Through Selber’s Mutliliteracies theoretical framework I would like to explore how I can incorporate projects in my college-level writing courses that consider how the students and technology interact. Selber claims, “students need access to tenure-line faculty members who specialize in the study of literacy and computers, articulated English courses that take up the cultural complications of computer technologies” (131). Rather than just coming up with projects using the next technological fad, I want the students to learn to use technology and consider its ramifications.

 

From Blueprints to CAD/CAM

My father was an engineer. He designed engine and transmission parts for both cars and airplanes. Even up to three years after his death, I received phone calls from employers looking for him and his skills. He never took a college course in his life. When Selber writes about Schon’s claim of the “erosion of the public confidence in professions that began in the 1960s and that continues today” (157), I am not surprised. My father graduated from high school in 1952. He became an apprentice and learned his profession on the job. In the 1980s when he needed to transition from blueprints to CAD/CAM he worked afternoons and learned became computer literate in his field. But anyone wanting his job today would have to have at least a four-year degree.

If you think about it, higher education does not have that much experience in designing curricula that corresponds with a profession in the field. Over the last several decades, employers are requiring future employees to pay for their own training. Another good example is police academies. In the past, police departments had their own academies funded by the state or local government and would pay individuals to attend and become officers. Now, most police forces not only do not have an academy but they expect new officers to hire in certified and recommend a four-year degree as well.

The private industries have also gradually shifted the responsibility of training onto the employee candidate and the taxpayers (in the form of funding public postsecondary education). The result is that “on a curricular level, students have not had sufficient opportunities to apply or test what they have learned in actual settings of use” (158).