Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Academic Exchange Quarterly

Inspiring college writers with web portfolios.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Writers sometimes come to college with attitudinal blocks to their development that an instructor can begin to overcome by listening to what they say about their early pedagogical experiences. One way to make use of this information is to situate their work in a public, Internet-based web ecology; web page portfolios, in fact, have distinct pedagogical advantages over traditional paper portfolios.

Introduction

For some educators, access to computer technology is the sine qua non to teaching people to write well. But technology is now so commonplace that educated people take it for granted--indeed, the early talk of motivating students to write better by using computers has quieted a great deal. The "gee whiz" factor has gone away. Technology by itself no longer motivates students the way it used to, and so instructors are back to looking for what makes people want to write well.

Listening to Students

I began to examine this issue by listening to the people in my classroom in part through on-going surveys of my composition classes first undertaken in the fall of 2003. Each semester I ask writers to complete the survey at the beginning of the course, and it includes questions like "what kind of writing assignments did you have in high school" and "what do you perceive as the goal of college composition courses." I wanted to gather data about what seems an odd discrepancy: although students say they hate writing, they do, in fact, enjoy it under some circumstances. The survey results have not been tested for statistical reliability, but I discovered some alarming anecdotal information. For example, when asked what criteria their high school teachers used to grade their papers, few writers responded with words describing anything like rhetorical effectiveness. Instead, they wrote that they had been graded on "spelling," "grammar," "MLA" style, "length," and most astonishing to me, "format." This evidence that writers have not been graded on rhetorical effectiveness is consistent with the types of assignments they said they had been given, which were mostly narrative (67 percent), informative (88 percent), or creative (92 percent) rather than persuasive and thoughtful. To be fair to high school teachers, for whom I have a tremendous respect, I do not know if the students just misunderstood how they were being assessed. But whatever the reality was of how their papers were graded, their perception of writing assessment is mechanically-centered and error-centered rather than effectiveness-centered or thought-centered. Interestingly, writers in my English Composition I classroom say that on a scale of 1 to 4, they rate their high school preparation for college English at 3.75; at the beginning of English Composition II, this number drops to 2.95. Clearly, writers come to the English Composition I classroom with a different set of expectations from what college instructors might prefer.

In addition to a shallow understanding of what makes a good paper, writers at least sometimes fail to see the relevance of the writing they are asked to do. My own son's experience in high school sophomore English is consistent with what my students tell me. He had a...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!