7.1 Stories I Need to Hear

Stories I Need to Hear: Review of CCCCs session A. 29: Exposing Some Basic Realities: A Conversation about BW Strategy from Portfolios and Stretch Courses to Studios and Mainstreaming - Patricia Gillikin

Someone from the audience, noting the session title, said before the session began, almost accusingly, “You’re doing everything!”

“We won’t,” one of the panelists reassured.

Kathleen DeVore began by explaining that Mary Kay Crouch, who was to have been a presenter in the session, passed away recently. She expressed regret at not getting to meet and work with Crouch on the session, and read aloud Crouch’s proposal description.

The session then fell into a pattern that I had seen before at other 4Cs and would see again at this 4Cs: a detailed description of a specific program, including institutional history, horror stories where appropriate, ending with What We Have Learned and What’s Next (or, What’s Next?). I find this pattern to be quite illuminating and useful; we have to tell our stories to each other, and we learn from doing so, about ourselves and from others. However, certain stories are more meaningful than others to us at any given time, and I was present in that moment, sitting at the front of the room trying to negotiate a borrowed laptop because the detailed online program said these folks were going to talk not only about Basic Writing but also about portfolios and critical literacy.

“Our college came to portfolios five years ago,” the story began. Gill Creel explained that most of the relevant documents for their portfolio program are accessible from this website: home.minneapolis.edu/~creelgi (including documents from this specific 4Cs session). The panelists also encouraged audience members to contact them: “We’ll give you whatever we have if you are interested in it.”

Indeed, I recommend this website for those interested in the details of the basic writing program the panelists described in this session, including the rubric for portfolio assessment. Kathleen DeVore’s passionate, insightful, and sometimes humorous paper from the session is also there, and it focuses in more detail than this review does on the critical literacy piece of the presentation.

The basics are this: Minneapolis Community and Technical College has a three-semester writing sequence, and just one of those classes is basic writing. They had an exit exam before introducing portfolio assessment, and Gill Creel described the assessment of that timed exam as a “soul-deadening experience” (this is the horror story part).

Creel explained, “We got the kind of writing you might expect. I am not mocking this writing; I am mocking what we did. We didn’t even have a rubric for the committee, and it was mostly about correctness.”

Creel briefly shared some of the student writing that came out of this fifty-minute timed exam, and then commented, “It’s so stunning how exactly alike they are, and how totally disconnected from the world they are--ahistorical documents. We would see writing in the class which was really jazzed, but then we had to teach to the test.”

“This is all about making the institution feel good about itself: ‘We HAVE an exit exam.’” It was “high stakes and low expectations.”

Then, the panelists described a sea change with the retirements of certain faculty members. In 2002, “we asked Linda Adler-Kassner to come in and do some work with us. Somebody else can come in and say exactly what you said, and people listen. She brought in some really helpful tools. We all sat down and argued--best thing that happened”—in a department with 13 full-time and18 part-time faculty.

By the spring of 2003, “we had a portfolio program--no piloting.” Describing the system put in place then that still exists, Creel said, “now assessment takes place in a round robin style. You have to assess twice as many as you teach. We cut a week off the end of the semester, and we use that time to do all of this.” The process is “still up or down, but now with rubric.” I was especially interested to hear—because it jibes with my own experience—that “the process of coming up with the rubric was the useful part.”

The panelists then spoke about “the energy in our department when we started the portfolio” and saw what students were producing. Now that students were writing about texts—Creel showed one example of a rhetorical analysis of Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue”—“they’re not bowed by the author. For good or for ill, we are bringing them into academic discourse more.” The portfolio system, Creel observed, “privileges the writer over the concerns of the institution—students think of themselves as writers, not just students. Timed writing makes them students.”

Kathleen DeVore’s paper came in about here. She explained that the panelists had wanted to move from gatekeeping to gateway, from exclusion to inclusion. Now, 90% of students who complete the class pass the portfolio assessment. Thrilled with these effects of portfolio assessment instead of timed-writing assessment, the panelists nevertheless aren’t satisfied yet, speaking of the “limitations and contradictions” of using portfolios: portfolios are instructor-, not student-centered, and error correction kept creeping back. “Shifting to portfolios did not make us all compositionists,” DeVore realized; therefore portfolios were just the beginning.

The next step for several faculty members, including DeVore, was critical literacy. Part of this involved students participating in choosing texts: “As students lobbied for one text over another some of them brought ‘street lobbying’ skills with them.”

Jeniffer Fennell began her part of the presentation with the dramatic improvement of going to portfolios, with students talking about their own lives, writing in a connected way: “We thought we’d arrived.”

However, students were producing texts that were very similar. “We see it in the reflection letters—kiss-ass letters—and in very prescriptive assignments.” The new formats were “better than the five-paragraph theme, but still were close in terms of structure. Every single paper looks the same. How can it be critical literacy if all the papers are the same?”

The ongoing battle is about the place of grammar. “Teachers are still more focused on getting rid of any trace of home language.” Fennell asked, “Is our job to eradicate [the home language]? We think no. Some of our colleagues say yes.” She added, “It still feels like teachers’ agendas are in control—we are still indoctrinating the students. How do we go from where we are to a more radical approach?”

The conclusion of the presentation was a brief survey of other options: stretch classes, studios, directed self-placement, and mainstreaming.

The question-and-answer period was lively, ranging from specifics of placement to the relationship between the developmental and the first-year course—practical questions. The panelists’ answer to the latter interested me, because it parallels the circumstances at my own community college; they explained that their first-year courses are “insistently textual”—which requires the same emphasis in basic writing.

My own question was, “What would the students’ writing look like if it wasnot all the same—indoctrinated? How might it surprise you? What qualities would it have? And—how would that be incorporated into a rubric?”

Kathleen DeVore responded with energy and excitement, sharing an example from her own teaching: “I was getting students making videos—real stuff got generated—stuff I couldn’t and didn’t assign.” She affirmed that she would “love a rubric that allows for this.”

I left that interchange thinking about how rubrics do tend to result insameness in student writing—certainly in some ways a good thing—but that we also want difference, aliveness, connection. Also, I was wondering, and am still wondering, how to sneak more room for that aliveness and unpredictability into a rubric—even create a rubric that expects it, expects the unexpected, predicts the unpredictable, describes what cannot be easily contained.

These paradoxical and practical thoughts may lead me someplace—I truly do want to be looking at revision to our own program’s rubrics, and UNM-Valencia Campus, and these thoughts may influence that process. Indeed, I found the entire session to be useful and insightful. It was a dramatization, in three voices, of common conflicts in basic writing. Every particular story, well-told, gives lessons to others—ideas, warnings, and possibilities. These stories from Minneapolis Community and Technical College helped me see how programs evolve, and they spurred me to reflect on how the program at my own school is evolving. There’s always a next step, another thing to work on, a way to improve—or, a new horrific challenge to face, though thankfully that latter was not the topic of this session.

The opportunity to resee my own program in the perspective of this one was especially valuable, and for that I’m grateful to the panelists, and I hope to experience more such useful sessions at future 4Cs.