Research
Reconnecting with My Inner Student
It is interesting to me how easily, how quickly, I forgot what it was like to be a student once I left that community to become a teacher, especially in light of how closely the two are linked, at least ostensibly. What I have found, though, is that there is a chasm between student and teacher that can be difficult to bridge.
The professors I admired usually seemed larger than life, highly intelligent, and they seemed to juggle their responsibilities as teachers and as scholars with ease. From my perspective, it was just a matter of fact that my teachers occupied a higher rung in the academic hierarchy, were smarter than me, more experienced than I was, and for those reasons they seemed larger than life. Teachers were a lot like celebrities. They had authority, they were well-respected, and being the center of attention was second nature to them.
In 2006 I left full-time teaching to return to school and earn a Ph.D. at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. The second course I took at IUP made brought the chasm between teacher and student clearly visible. I’m a teacher who prides himself on his flexibility, his ability to ad lib when necessary. I would always prepare a lesson plan, but I might or might not adhere to it strictly, preferring to use it as a general roadmap. I was willing to take detours and let the course unfold naturally, to a degree. My professor in the summer course had the opposite philosophy. He planned classes to the minute, and he became bothered if the class deviated from his schedule. Unhappy with class discussions, he instituted a hand-raising policy for those who wanted to speak. And I thought, here I am a doctoral student, and I have to raise my hand, as if I’m in grade school all over again.
The first week of class, I felt stifled and a little bewildered. I was so used to doing it my way that I resisted being herded into a rigid structure. This professor seemed too strict to me, too intent on adhering to his lesson plan, and he didn’t allow for the exploration of ideas that arose in discussion.
I reflected on that, and eventually it hit me: I was a student again. The authority that I loved was gone, and I had to submit to the methods of the professor who taught the course. Once I accepted that my resistance melted away, my outlook improved exponentially, and I learned a lot from him, but the struggle stuck with me: To be a great teacher, I believe one must remember what it feels like to be a student, to feel powerless, and allow that to inform what he/she does in the classroom.
Reconnecting Teacher and Student
My dissertation research is a phenomenological study about journal writing in Freshman composition. I’ve been an avid journal keeper since my senior year in high school, and journal keeping is a central fixture of my literature practice. In my teaching, I have used journals off and on from the very beginning of my career, and when I was shopping for dissertation topics, I kept gravitating back to journals. I was teaching at UPJ at the time, and my students were keeping personal journals in the course, and I began to wonder, what are my students experiencing?
I began researching the topic, reviewing the literature, and I found that the student experience with journal writing in the classroom was almost completely untouched, which surprised me since journal writing is a classroom staple that spans disciplines. Plenty of studies sought to quantify student “reflectiveness”, but almost none focused on the student experience. I organized a pilot study with some former students with the goal of gauging the value of the research that was beginning to captivate me. From the pilot study I learned several surprising things about the student experience with journal writing, and from there I decided to organize a larger scale study, which is becoming my dissertation.
Why phenomenology? I was drawn to a phenomenological approach because it allowed me to get closer to my former students than other research methodologies seemed to allow. In my approach, my former students became more than participants in the study, they became “co-researchers” (Moustakas) in the sense that they were invited to participate in the research at every avenue, from interviews, to reviewing the interview and interpretations of those interviews. At every step in the process, I have included my co-researchers.
Secondly, and importantly, I wanted my research to take what van Manen calls a “pedagogical orientation”, that it acknowledges the importance of teaching, of treating students with kindness, and yes, love. Phenomenology allows me to get closer to my former students than was ever possible in the classroom, and it gives me a structure with which to understand their experiences. I see my dissertation as a pedagogical dissertation at its core, and given the importance of pedagogy in my discipline of composition studies, I see phenomenology as an excellent fit.
Interestingly, phenomenology is seldom used in composition research, partly because phenomenology can seem a little soft around the edges because it lacks any sort of quantitative interest. Composition studies, a discipline that has long fought for respectability in the academy, relied on quantitative studies to give it an certain legitimacy as a discipline, and the fight to maintain that legitimacy is always being waged. Nevertheless, I do call for compositionists to pay more attention to phenomenology; I believe it can add a wonderfully rich and valuable dimension to our discipline because it respects students and their experiences. It breaks downs the barriers between teachers and students, and it is explicitly pedagogical, just like composition studies.
Post Process and Beyond
For my money, the most important contribution by post-process theorists is the admission that the process movement, once it became codified and entrenched in the mainstream, was just as bad the the current-traditional approach to writing instruction in that it became lifeless and mindless: Writing is a process, moving from step A, B, to C. Scholars, Sondra Perl among them, issued a corrective to this by emphasizing the recursive nature of writing, but the damage had been done. When I was being trained as a writing teacher at Kansas State University by Irene Ward (whose work I admire), we were trained to teach writing in steps; recursion and personal style was not mentioned. I admire that the post-process scholars, notably Kent et al. called attention to that problem.
So, when I overheard a group of students entering a compositon classroom complaining about how much they hated the class, I thought of that. I believe we need less rules and steps, and more emphasis on living and meaning and how writing is an indispensable part of that equation. And I have endeavored to bring that awareness to my students.
In my literacy research I see a gradual progression from conceptions of literacy as a stable, monolithic construction to a pluralist approach that turns the word into “literacies”, which are always changing and interacting in complex ways within cultural and social contexts. That shift begins in roughly the middle 1970s, which parallels nicely with the growth of sociolinguistics as an autonomous field of inquiry, and that is not a coincidence. In fact, I see striking parallels between the growth of composition studies and the growth of sociolinguistics, both fields informing the other as we move away from those monolithic constructions to account for language as a living thing carried out by living people who always write and speak within a social dimension.
But what happened then? Now, the social constructionists seem to dominate the field, as if the social is the only dimension to writing, when, in fact, it isn’t. Writing can be deeply personal, and it can aid a person, like no other medium, in finding meaning. I know that I feel most alive when I’m writing, when I’m expressing myself, and that makes me feel like I matter; I am here. I am alive. So yes, language is social, but it is also expressive, and it issues from the individual. I grow weary of the binary, the either/or between social construction and expressionism, with the social constructionists attacking those who would dare imply that language is also very selfish: it is expressive, and we all need to express ourselves. I see so much overlap there, between those views, and I hope to add to that dialogue in future research and writing.
