So you’re flying this airplane, right? Parts keep falling off, and you’re scrambling to reattach them. Meanwhile copilots, flight attendants, and even passengers are offering calm, helpful advice as you frantically try to keep the plane intact and your flight pattern on course. Tell me, how did you get in the air?
We cannot overestimate the importance of invention and prewriting. As Trim and Isaac say, “you will find that energy invested in the invisible stages of writing pays dividends later on” (110). More than simply providing an opening into your writing task, these “invisible stages” help cultivate ideas. They provide an opportunity to really lay some groundwork towards understanding what you want to say and how you want to say it.
How do we get our students to find a topic that really speaks to them? How do we get them going? During the first week of unit one, many of my students announced that they hated to read. They were firmly opposed to reading or writing anything they were told to read or write. However, when it came to choosing topics, one or two mentioned that they had hoped I would provide a list of topics for them.
As TA’s, some of us have chosen to adhere fairly loosely to the definition of sustainability as applied to our students’ papers. In several cases I asked students what they were interested in, and we worked together to tie their topics into sustainability. Even utilizing this technique, my students struggled. I don’t know if they were inhibited by fear of failure, fear of censorship, or some other fear that they might not even have recognized, but this particular freedom to choose any topic in the world was daunting for my students. They wanted their list and strict guidelines.
Antlitz attributes a large portion of this dilemma to writing anxiety and offers a variety of solutions to the blank-paper malady, including “movement, sound, intentional distraction, role playing, journaling, and prayer and meditation” (82). While some of these could be applied to our metaphor of flying, I think they are more helpful as writing invention strategies after all.
Now check the altitude gauges and trajectory (and forgive any technical inaccuracies in my metaphor).
I wonder if I asked my students to commit to a topic too soon. I wonder if they felt committed to a topic before they were comfortable with it. I wonder if I pushed them off the runway with one mighty heave before they even knew where they were going or if they wanted to go there.
It is possible that my students felt this way at some point. If they did not engage in the invention strategies or understand the importance and relevance of the freewrites, clustering exercises, and group activities I introduced to them to encourage deep exploration of possible PAA topics, it is possible that they felt trapped when they were instructed to begin writing.
I did not deliberately embed inventing activities throughout the personal academic argument writing process, but it seems like a no-brainer now. Lessner and Craig describe the benefits of inventing throughout the writing process. Many of their invention strategies emphasize flexibility and continual exploration, “In looking at invention as a “single act,” they say, “you might miss how helpful invention can really be as an ongoing developmental practice that allows new ideas and exciting connections to be made” (127).
“Finding Your Way In” provided very accessible ways to get students to continue thinking about their subject as they write. Lessner and Craig’s invention strategies are intended to help “stretch your writerly muscles” (128). I did not mean to allow my students to put ‘er on autopilot, but while grading my PAA’s, I discovered that many of them would have benefited from exercises that explicitly reviewed where they started, where they were heading, the angle they were taking to get there, and the places that they stopped along the way. Perhaps, if I had, they would have changed their destination.
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ReplyDeleteI think you bring up a good point, and your analogy of the airplane is fitting. As I read through my students' PAAs I have the eerie sense that what you are describing, something akin to pushing fledgling birds out of the nest too soon, is what occurred in their writing process. Some of the arguments seem unfocused and, at times, lacking any sense of purpose. I really tried to hammer it home with the Project Narratives and for some students it seemed to help, but with others I think something else needed to be done. So far, what I like about the given syllabus is that it allows us multiple angles of attack for getting at the heart of different students' writing-both in terms of strengths and weaknesses.
ReplyDeleteThe difficulty, for now, is how well we can, as novice teachers, apply the various strategies to best effect for every student. Bamberg's piece brought home the point that multiple strategies will necessarily need to be employed in order to reach the maximal number of students; however, the piece also brought home, to me at least, that I am only human and that I only have the one class, i.e. I can only employ so many techniques in so little time with only so much energy. I've looked at several pieces of reflective writing and it's funny to see what the individual students found helpful; for some it was the Project Narrative, others the conference, and, not surprisingly, for a very few the peer-reviews. The question then becomes how to take this aggregated information (student responses to activities, final products, overall impressions of how various lessons/inventions go, final grades) and make a decision about how to tailor the syllabus and lesson plans for next semester.
So, obviously this first semester is going to be useful as we learn which methods we employ turn out to be effective, and which fall flat. In this regard, I just gave Melissa's suggestion (to use a piece of fruit for getting a class started on question generation) a try. It was a hit, the fastwrite responses were overwhelmingly positive, if not glowing. So, I'm definitely going to use that activity in the future. However, I know for a fact that some of my other generating activities were major duds not to be repeated. (Things typed on computers by students and commented on by other students didn't work. Why? I don't know. Should I try it again? I don't know! It was in The Curious Writer. IT SHOULD WORK!) The idea of trial and error was also something valuable in the Bamberg article, as it was obvious that a whole lot of other teachers tried a whole lot of other ideas, more or less successfully. So, don't be afraid to try new things; if they don't work, then at least you've got one less activity to try and fit into your lesson plans.
Ah, flying the half made airplane: true of learning to teach, true of learning to write. I think this might be a good counter example to the "allatonceness" principal, or maybe just how that principal can pan out. I think where my plane has fallen apart was in expecting, rather than talking about and making accountability for, students to understand how much of drafting and redrafting is invention. I know for this unit I'll be working to include invention into every LP in one form or another to try and head off the procrastination/doing as little homework as possible factor.
ReplyDeleteI'm working hard to chalk activity flops up to trial and error. As is evidenced in too many of my students' PAAs, the plane didn't magically assemble before it left the ground for anyone in my class, not for me, not for my students. Too often, I've found myself getting bogged down in trying to explain concepts rather than just having students get a working understanding of them through invention activities. What's helpful about Lessner's and Craig's discussion of invention is that, no matter where we're at in the writing process, we've got an activity to go that will help get students inventing. Like Savannah, I'm hoping that more invention activities will be especially fruitful as I go through and revise my LPs for the Op-Ed. Invention may not be magic, but from here it's looking like it might be as good as that military duct tape that has a reputation for holding together beat up helicopters until they can get back to ground. Once things aren't in danger of crashing, I'll reassess. Until then, my students will be inventing inventing inventing.
I'd say that the most helpful part of Lessner and Craig's article was their exploration of different kinds of freewrites. As simple as they may seem, freewrites are one of the pieces of invention that I (and my class) struggle most with. Do I collect them? Do I have the students share? How long should they write for? How guided should the freewrites be? I've been feeling that my freewriting excercises could be much more effective as invention work, but I wasn't quite certain how to go about improving them. However, as I've been slowly realizing, in a classroom context sometimes just a very subtle change in language can make a world of difference. Calling them, instead of freewrites, "focused freewrites," or "critical freewrites" as Lessner and Craig do, would be a small but important step in guiding the students. Right now, when I tell them we have a ten-minute freewrite, I often recieve pieces of writing that are quite unstructured, rambling from here to there without ever touching on anything useful or helpful -- this comes in part because of Ballanger's "Write Badly" decree, which I tried to interpret in my classroom as "polished" writing versus "unpolished" writing. The student, of course, grabbed onto the concept of "bad" and won't let go, because it gives them the freedom not to actually do any worthwhile work in in-class freewrites. I try to ask specific, guiding questions, but still the freewrites seem abstracted and laxadaisical. MAYBE, though, if I start assigning "focused freewrites," and specifying that I want some kind of development from beginning to end, the writing will improve and the activity will improve along with it. It's these small, guided changes that I think will make a difference in my class' invention work.
ReplyDeleteIt pleased me to see that I've done some of Antlitz' exercises already, though in slightly different forms -- we did something akin to her Random Words exercise, and we've done the wing exercise without using the bird drawing, but I never told the students why they were doing the exercises beforehand. I'd wait 'til the exercises were done, and then slowly in the course of discussion tease out what I wanted the students to get out of the activity. I'd ask leading questions and drop hints until I got the satisfactory answer. I wonder, would it be more helpful to just straight-out tell students the purpose of their activities? I want to believe that they learn better when they figure things out for themselves, but let's face it -- much of the time that they're "figuring things out for themselves," I'm up there at the front of the class desperately waving my light-up baton and trying to get them onto the right runway (to keep up with the plane metaphors).
Invention's also tricky because I think most students view it as the "easy" part of writing a paper, and thus treat it not as seriously. I've tried to explain to them that their success on invention work will directly impact the ease with which they eventually write the "real thing," but it's tough to get that across until they experience it for themselves.
I'd have to agree with everyone above, about the complexity - and importance - of invention, and also the harrowing task of helping our students learn how to invent, and then productively narrow in on a topic. I think that the various modes of freewrite that Lessner and Craig talk about are valuable, as Emma mentioned. I'm never certain how my students feel about freewriting, and this may be because they all feel slightly differently about it. But I think that it's something that, even when they are resistant to it at first, or nerve-wracked, they see the value of after the fact.
ReplyDeleteI say this largely because I just finished reading through my students' reflective essays, and I was struck by how much they talked about the invention process, the value of freewrite, and especially, the value of "inquiry" as a big concept. Remarkably, they really seemed to get it, and they also seemed to be able to see their process and their progress as writers within a process of invention. I was also surprised at how much the valued one another's input, and understood that dialogue - real conversation with other people - is a really useful part of invention.
I think it's important for us as teachers (or for me, at least), to remember how useful invention prompts really are for students, and, even if it seems like they aren't "into" it, they're probably getting something out of it, even if they don't realize it at the time.