Table Of Content

DOCUMENT RESUME CS 215 740 ED 404 649 Tinberg, Howard B. AUTHOR Border Talk: Writing and Knowing in the Two-Year TITLE College. National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, INSTITUTION Ill. ISBN-0-8141-0378-2 REPORT NO 97 PUB DATE NOTE 112p. National Council of Teachers of English, 1111 W. AVAILABLE FROM Kenyon Road, Urbana, IL 61801-1096 (Stock No. 03782-3050: $14.95 members; $19.95 nonmembers). Viewpoints (Opinion/Position Papers, Essays, etc.) PUB TYPE Non-Classroom Use (055) Books Guides (120) (010) MF01/PC05 Plus Postage. EDRS PRICE Ethnography; Interdisciplinary Approach; Language DESCRIPTORS Arts; Postsecondary Education; *Reflective Teaching; Rhetoric; *Student Needs; Teacher Student Relationship; *Theory Practice Relationship; *Two Year Colleges; Two Year College Students; *Writing Instruction; *Writing Teachers; Writing Workshops Academic Discourse Communities; Job Relatedness; IDENTIFIERS *Teaching Perspectives; Writing Thinking Relationship ABSTRACT By intertwining narratives, journals, interviews, and traditional analysis and argument, this book offers an ethnographic account of a diverse group of community college faculty working together to revise their writing center's tutor protocols and expectations for student writing. In doing so, it takes postsecondary writing teachers to the place referred to as the "border"--the sometimes conflicted space occupied by the two-year college, between high schools and universities, between academia and the workplace. In the course of the book, these teachers, including nursing, statistics, history, and English faculty, address many of the unique concerns facing two-year college faculty: reconciling their specialized knowledge with the college's commitment to general and comprehensive education; initiating students who have had little success in school into the academic enterprise; and reconceiving their work to include both scholarship and teaching. The book also engages in broader debates about the nature of good writing, writing instruction, and the educational mission of the two-year college. Beyond its ethnographic account, the book offers insight into theoretical questions regarding authorship and evaluation and presents s view of community college faculty as reflective and impassioned practitioners. An appendix is entitled "What Each Discipline Wants--A Conversation." Contains 63 references. (MKA) *********************************************************************** * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * * from the original document. *********************************************************************** PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) AM. U S DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATOR Once ol Eoucationat Research 111.0 Irnpronernerd EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) Vf"rhis document has been reproduced as received from the person or organizetron Onginal.ncl 0 Minot changes have been made to ornproye reproduction Quality doeu- Points of cew or °Pinions staled lr1 t mem do not necessarily represent official OE RI pos.hon or polity 4A4L6 9 AM 1111 BEST COPY AVAILABLE Border Talk 3 NCTE Editorial Board: Pat Cordeiro, Colette Daiute, Bobbi Fisher, Brenda Greene, Richard Luckert, Bill McBride, Al leen Pace Nilsen, Jerrie Cobb Scott, Karen Smith, Chair, ex officio, Michael Greer, ex officio NCTE College Section Committee: Frank Madden, Chair, Westchester Community College; Gail E. Hawisher, Assistant Chair, University of Illi- nois at Urbana-Champaign; Pat Belanoff, SUNYStony Brook; Theresa Enos, CCCC Representative, University of Arizona, Tucson; Dawn Rodrigues, Bennington, Vermont; Ida Simmons Short, Schoolcraft Col- lege; Howard Tinberg, Bristol Community College; Demetrice A. Worley, Bradley University; Collett Dilworth, CEE Representative, East Carolina University; Louise Smith, ex officio, Editor, College English, University of Massachusetts at Boston; Miriam Chaplin, Executive Committee Liaison, Rutgers University; Patricia Lambert Stock, NCTE Staff Liaison. Border Talk Writing and Knowing in the Two-Year College Howard B. Tinberg Bristol Community College National Council of Teachers of English 1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, Illinois 61801-1096 Manuscript Editor: Lee Erwin Production Editor: Michelle Sanden Johlas Interior Design: Tom Kovacs for TGK Design Cover Design: Jenny Jensen Greenleaf NCTE Stock Number 03782-3050 1997 by the National Council of Teachers of English, 1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, Illinois 61801-1096. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. It is the policy of NCTE in its journals and other publications to provide a forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching of En- glish and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors, or the membership at large, except in announcements of policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tinberg, Howard B., 1953 Border talk : writing and knowing in the two-year college / Howard B. Tinberg. cm. p. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8141-0378-2 (pbk.) 1. Community college teachersUnited States. 2. Community colleges Unites States. 3. College teachingUnited States. 4. English language RhetoricStudy and teachingUnited States. 5. Language artsCorrela- tion with content subjectsUnited States. I. National Council of Teachers of English. II. Title. LB2331.72.T56 1997 378.1'25dc21 97-3901 Contents Acknowledgments vi Introduction: Community College Teachers as Border Crossers vii How We Got Here, Where We Want to Go 1. 1 Are We Specialists or Generalists? 2. 11 Our Ways of Reading and Knowing 20 3. Using History 4. 27 Responding to Student Writing 34 5. Is All Knowledge Provisional? 44 6. Is Assessing Writing Possible? 50 7. What Is Good Writing? 56 8. Seeing Ourselves as Experts 64 9. Closing: Telling Our Story 71 Appendix: What Each Discipline WantsA Conversation 74 87 Works Cited Index 91 Author 95 v Acknowledgments For three weeks in July of 1994, my colleagues Peter Griffin, erry LePage, Kathleen Lund, Carol Martin, Patricia Massey, Marlene Pollock, and Diane Silveria and I engaged in a conversation about writing, reading, knowing, and, of course, teaching, in the disciplines. I want to thank them from the start for engaging in a frank and thoughtful discussion of the things that matter so much to all of us. I would like to thank as well two men whose efforts in authoring our Title 3 grant set up both our college's writing lab and the annual sum- mer workshops: Paul Fletcher and Ray Lavertue. Quite literally, without these "founding fathers" we would not have been sitting in room D209 for those three weeks. Also due thanks is Chris Gilbert, our team's learning specialist, who, although unable to attend all our workshop sessions, added immeasur- ably to the quality and depth of our discussions. I want to express thanks as well to Greg Cupples, whose technical and office support were invaluable to the smooth running both of the workshop and of the lab generally. Thanks need to be extended to the peer tutors who attended our work- shopDebra Cupples and Robert Correiraand who contributed an important perspective to our deliberations. I would also like to acknowledge the ongoing support of our college's administration, especially our president, Eileen Farley, and our dean of academic affairs, David Feeney. And I want to thank my colleague and friend Ronald Weisberger for offering kind and sage advice on this manuscript. Last, and most deeply, I want to thank my family and to say, simply, this is for Toni, Miriam, and Leah. vi Introduction: Community College Teachers as Border Crossers Crossing the border evokes ambivalent images.... Ruth Behar To teach at a community college is to be "in translation" or between places. With their mission to provide vocational training and to prepare students for transfer to colleges and universities, community colleges have always had a complex purpose (Cohen and Brawer 1982). That complexity col- ors instruction at all times. What we teach and how we teach must reflect the diverse needs of our students, the needs of those who plan to transfer to four-year institutions and the needs of those who intend to enter the workplace immediately upon graduating from the community college; the needs of traditionally aged students and the needs of so-called returning students, who have spent years out of school. A poem, for example, must be read and taught to suit the complexities of the community college classroom. How will their histories shade students' readings? The task of tailoring instruction to students' histories and needs has become even more complex as students' numbers increase. The expan- sion of community college enrollment since the 1960s has been well docu- mented. As of 1988, when the Commission on the Future of Community Colleges published Building Communities, nearly half of all undergradu- ates in the United States attended community colleges (Building 1988). It is hardly surprising, given the range and complexity of our task, that community college faculty are perceived as overworked. But what usually follows is an assumption that community college faculty are teaching drones, burned-out husks of what we once were, with little time and incli- nation to stay up-to-date on current scholarship and research. In one recent study, two researchers of the community college scene declared that community colleges were everywhere experiencing an "academic crisis," their faculty facing the prospects of little promotion and doomed to teach the same courses year after year (McGrath and Spear 1991). Two-year college faculty, they assert, simply have little opportunity to engage in dialogue with colleagues even down the corridor, let alone in other institutions. They spend more and more class time teaching basic or reme- dial skills, not the college-level courses that they thought they would be teaching when they began. That picture would seem to be supported by a profile done of a single community college during the 1970s, in which vii viii Introduction faculty member after faculty member testified to the hindrances to teaching (London 1978). "Sometimes they make life a little difficult," says a math teacher of her students: and they come in not having read the chapter that was assigned for the week, not even having tried the home work. Then I usually just go back, give a brief lecture, and then we talk our way through the chapter. Sometimes most of them come in unprepared. (117) While they describe real problems facing community college teachers, such studies yield very little information about the reflection that accom- panies the teaching that two-year college faculty do. We rarely see or hear faculty theorizing about their discipline or their teaching (trying to solve, for example, the problem of why students are not reading their texts). In short, we see very little of community college teachers at workprepar- ing lessons, adjusting to the classroom moment, engaging in thoughtful reflection and dialogue. The image of community college faculty as workhorse teachers is rein- forced in a survey done by the Carnegie Foundation. More than 90 per- cent polled said that they were more interested in teaching than in research. The question was phrased, "Do your interests lie primarily in research or in teaching?" (Boyer 1990, 44). Given the either/or option, the faculty responded in a way that could be hardly surprising. The problem is that the question perpetuates the illogical separation of teaching and research. In recent years, certain calls have gone out that we reconsider the nature of research and scholarship, and their relationship to teaching (Boyer 1990; Vaughan 1994; Tinberg, "Border-Crossings" 1993). Ernest Boyer, an influential voice, has called for a "scholarship of teaching" (1990, 23). Some have actually argued that we see classroom activities as the fit sub- ject of research in its own right. In composition studies, methods borrowed from fields such as psychology and anthropologythe case study, the oral history, the ethnographyhave had an important impact (Kantor, Kirby, and Goetz 1981; Calkins 1985). With the renewed emphasis on teaching (as opposed to research) and on cross-disciplinary learning, such classroom research has inspired a tremendous amount of interest in a short time (Angelo and Cross 1993; Goswami and Stillman 1987; Daiker and Morenberg 1990; Ray 1993). But such calls have the net effect of further segregating teaching from another, more privileged form of research and scholarship (which Boyer renames "the scholarship of discovery" [17]). Classroom research runs the danger, in my view, of being the things that teachers do when they can't do the "right" kind of research.