A Pedagogy of Alchemy

In my first-year writing classes this morning, my students brought in second drafts of the assignment we're working on at the moment. These are two sections of W130, called "Principles of Composition," and it's a developmental writing course. At this institution, students take a brief exam to help them determine whether they should enroll in one of three courses--W100, a course for students who especially need help preparing for the demands of college writing, W130, the course I am teaching that acts as a more gradual transition into the practices and habits of mind of academic discourse, or W131, "Elementary Composition," a course title that strikes me as misleading since it is the required FYW course. (Elementary carries, at least for me, connotations of simple, plain, beginning--connotations that range from derogatory to wrong. It suggests that, somehow, this will be students' first encounter with writing. Also, it's worth noting that the writing programs in IU have agreed that this name needs to change to reflect what the course actually does.)

At this stage in the assignment, I have provided an extra week of instruction to help students generate a paper in response to the assignment: an editorial analysis. We spent a couple of weeks reading editorials together to see how they function as brief public forms of argument, and based on how poorly the first drafts went, we spent an extra week focusing specifically on how to structure their essays to generate the kinds of analysis necessary to meet the assignment.

This requires something of a mea culpa: I don't think they were prepared to write their first drafts. I think they needed a little more time to discuss editorials and the basics of rhetorical analysis. That is, first and foremost, a flaw in the pace of the course. This is my first time teaching a developmental writing course (or a preparatory writing course, as the nomenclature goes here), so I made efforts all semester to adjust my expectations according to the stated goals of the course.

And here we are at the second draft: At this point, I have commented extensively on the first drafts, spent another week helping students to generate ideas in class and to think about how paragraph structure itself can generate more ideas, and spent another week conferencing with each student, focusing for 15 to 20 minutes on their work. We looked at their revisions-in-progress and talked about what was really working and what wasn't.

So why am I disappointed with the new drafts?

I believe in a pedagogy of alchemy--a pedagogy that depends on both the willingness to change my practices and the belief that my students and I can find better ways to work together in the pursuit of knowledge. I am an absurdly optimistic writing teacher. Really!

My syllabi change in drastic ways every semester because I am seeking out that missing activity that will finally make things click. I hope to present readings and assignments that will encourage students to invest their attention and effort in the course. It's an awfully inconvenient pedagogy because it routinely forces me to reinvent my assignments and my strategies. But I do it, because I remain optimistic that eventually, I'll find ways to engage students that are foolproof.

There is no assignment that will work with every group. How can there be, since there are so many variables, most of which are out of my control? The group dynamic of a class; the literacy experiences of each student; the amount of attention a student feels obligated to give my course when she is taking three or four others while working twenty hours a week; the serious discomfort my back and shoulder have decided to give me today, which is doubtless influencing my reception of my students' writing. The list goes on.

But this doesn't stop me from seeking out new ways to help students learn to write and revisiting old strategies. Just today, James M. Lang reported on an experiment with Twitter in his class that has me thinking about how to use social media to help students process and synthesize knowledge. I don't know that I'll use Twitter, but I have used course blogs in just this way in the past and found it to have a profound impact on how students read. I even presented on my findings at a conference a few years ago. Why did I stop using those blogs? How could I revisit that assignment and revitalize it for my students next semester? Will I be able to produce gold if I bring them back next semester?

Don't get me wrong: I don't assume responsibility for my students' achievements or their failures. I am not that vain. All writers are complicated beings with lives who must work with complex schedules and differing levels of experience and knowledge to produce texts. But I try to remember that I bear much of the burden when an assignment goes wrong.

Where is the line? Where does my responsibility as a writing teacher end? When is it reasonable to expect students to meet the goals we set in the course without feeling a twinge of remorse that I could have done more? When do I stop saying, like ill-fated Boxer, "I will work harder?"

If I support a pedagogy of alchemy, then I force myself to admit that, while I may be seeking out the perfect formulation for the perfect course, I will never get there. But that's okay. Alchemists never made gold, but they learned a lot about the principles of the natural world along the way. I can only hope my students and I are learning something about writing along the way.