On track, on target, on page with Andrea Lunsford

This year's NC Symposium on Teaching Writing --held at NC State and entitled Shifting Platforms: New Media, Emerging Literacies, & the Writing Teacher-- is a welcome sign that the rhet/comp community (which has been for me a source of inspiration and pedagogical ideas and insights for many years) continues to lead the way on the teaching+media front.

I have a quizzical relationship to writing, even though I love learning and the play of ideas. So I've long been in search of new paradigms of writing. I could write well enough to get good grades in school and that sort of thing. Yet I never wrote with enjoyment until email came along and caused me to realize that my longstanding lack of enjoyment re: writing was bound-up with the solitary, non-conversational way it had been framed for me in school. It was the situational grammar, the discursive formation, the setting or framing, that put me at cross-purposes with writing. So it was a revelation for me that writing could be conversational and enjoyable.

W. B. Macomber

My favorite professor in my undergraduate years at U.C. Santa Barbara was William Macomber. He presaged my eventual embrace of conversational writing when he told us that if we really wanted to learn how to write we should fall in love with someone who lives far away, and if we really wanted to learn how to talk we should fall in love with someone who lives close by. That's what I call teachin'. This was in 1971, when I was a freshman in college, and it was quite a few years before the widespread dispersion and adoption of electronically-based conversational writing practices in society. Yet some, like Macomber, got the news early and started promoting a different view of the practices and purposes of academic writing.

Within schools in general, though, the requirement that all writing must be solitary was pretty easily enforced by 1) the allied grammatical stricture of isolating students via individualized assessment/grading, and 2) the lack of alternative forms of writing practice either inside or outside of schools. The situation may be significantly different now, in that it seems to be becoming more difficult to maintain the isolationist grammar given that electronic media has proliferated alternative types of writing, and given that students have mastered these alternatives in many instances outside of school and prior to starting college. In this regard I was delighted that Ms. Lunsford addressed the need for changes in institutional grammar --in particular the need to re-think the emphasis on the individual-- along with changes in the way new media is perceived and used, in her talk at the symposium.

Anyway, to complete this loop, I came to the realization that writing could be an enjoyable, powerful engine of learning by collaborating with an English rhet/comp student when I was doing my doctoral work. I was at the time a doc student in the social and philosophical foundations of Education. My collaborator and I carried on an extended conversation in writing via email on topics of mutual interest, and each of us ended up using the edited transcript of our conversation as the centerpiece of our two, separate and differently framed, dissertations --one in English, one in Education. It was this interdisciplinary collaboration that clued me in to the great work being done re: teaching+media in the rhet/comp community, and to the potential of conversational writing to add important dimensions to learning. Both dissertations were approved BTW, and degrees granted, in 1995.

Andrea Lunsford

Andrea Lunsford's keynote address --entitled The Role of Rhetoric and (New Media) Writing in 21st Century Universities-- focused on: 1) re-framing the notion of 'writing' to include involvement with mediums other than text, 2) shifting the focus of such writing towards "making things happen in the world", and 3) maintaining a commonsensical and also arch case for the value of rhetoric-based education. These are all premises that underpin the DMA course, and bolster my ongoing development as a teacher. It's the second item --making things happen in the world-- that I think resonates with the social, conversational writing that I have advocated for some time. In writing conversationally there is a real audience, real perspectives are transformed, and this in turn affects how we live and learn in the real world.

Lunsford is a Professor of English and Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford. More importantly in my scheme of things, she is the real deal --meaning she practices everything she professes. As such, her keynote was insightful and inspiring, and full of good examples. As might be expected, her presentation was also exquisitely balanced in its rhetorical appeal and delivery.

She first became one of my heroes when she clearly stated her support for the idea that student writing --including texting and everything else-- is indeed WRITING, and should for this very reason be accorded the highest respect. Many were the times that I shook my head as teachers, who were my audience in workshops I used to give re: how to use the internet, would say that they could not get students to write because they (the students) were too busy texting, messaging, and emailing one another.

I knew these teachers meant that texting and so forth were not the same as writing essays, but still it gave me pause, I mean real pause, because they did not seem to hear themselves actually saying that students had no time or motivation for writing because they were writing too much. And, gulp, sometimes, all to often really, these types of comments were coming from teachers of writing. So it was a joy to discover that Andrea, a bona fide English teacher at a top drawer university, was insisting that when people are writing they are writing. Let us now be thankful for small things I guess :)

I've had several students write, unprompted, in blogs and so forth that they, too, are delighted to know that Andrea, an adult and English teacher, actually thinks they are bringing important skills and dispositions to the act of writing. Note, though, Lunsford is absolutely certain students need to be able to leverage and extend their abilities in a variety of ways while they are in college, for example by learning how to develop and communicate a stepwise, complex argument (premises, propositions, support, conclusion, etc.) and to do so within a recognizable arc that includes a beginning, middle, and end.

In my estimation Lunsford is side-by-side with Mimi Ito on these kinds of issues --not only in POV, but also in doing the research to back up the POV. Like Ito, Lunsford has for years been involved in careful longitudinal study of youth involvement with media --in Lunsford's case the focus is on student writing, in class and outside of school, and on the myriad ways in which the notion of writing is expanding right before our very eyes (or, with a nod to Derrida, expanding in the eyes of our pupils). It's time to stop bashing student culture, students' new ways of learning, and their writing. It's time to open our own eyes and expand our ways of seeing. Lunsford states this clearly and unequivocally. It is time to understand and build on what's going on, time to get on with it. YES!

So, it was a wonderful experience of convergence, confirmation, and new learning for me to hear Ms. Lunsford talk about the aims, grammars, forms, and nitty-gritty practices of education, and the need to align such matters with the magnificent give and take of the NOW. This is the kind of alignment I am seeking all the time in the DMA course.

So, here's my conclusion. I think everybody should listen to Andrea Lunsford, plain and simple, just like that. Accordingly, I recorded her talk and it can be heard via the embedded media player below. Enjoy!