Two of this week’s readings for my composition pedagogy class
came from the volume of collected essays What
is “College-Level” Writing, ed. By Sullivan, Tinberg and Blau – Sheridan Blau’s
article on creating “genres” of writing for classroom communities by developing
them from within, and Patrick Sullivan’s call for the importance of teaching
reading if we want to create good writers.
To begin, I felt that the Sullivan article was well presented
and offered a good argument for the connections between college readiness in
reading and college readiness in writing, but it did seem a little obvious to
me. Anyone who teaches in a post-secondary setting today realizes that the
difficulty students have reading and focusing on the demands of longer texts
lies at the heart of many of our students’ problems in our courses. My
understanding of this comes from a perspective gained from the classic
musicology curriculum, characterized by several transitional stages in a
student’s development from a first-year undergraduate through to graduate
studies that involve a “step up” in the difficulty of the readings assigned,
and kinds of reading with which most students do not have previous experience.
A musicology student begins mastering introductory textbook reading, and
several years later is able to handle complex thesis-driven writing that draws
heavily on critical theory and historical analysis, at least in theory.
Last semester I taught a graduate seminar that included several
music performers who had never before taken a graduate level course. This
semester I am teaching a “senior seminar” for music majors, most of whom are
intending to continue on to pursue some kind of graduate degree, either MA,
DMA, or PhD. In both of these classes I have tackled the teaching of “reading” head on
in an overt and planned way. This
semester in particular I feel that much of what I do in this senior seminar is
to introduce my students to new kinds of readings and discussion about those
readings, and I seek to develop their skills in the core activities that will
make them successful in graduate school. As part of this agenda I have
purposefully planned my assigned readings so that they have increased in
difficulty over the past 5 weeks, starting with advanced textbook reading and
now progressing to more difficult journal articles. In a few weeks we will
tackle our first article that includes sections drawing on critical theory, in
this case feminist and gender theory – it will be interesting to see what they
make of it! The class is discussion-oriented, so it is easy and natural to
begin discussions by asking questions that relate to the way the reading is
written as well as its content, such as asking about where the thesis is stated
most clearly, how the evidence fits the argument, or where students had
difficulties understanding the author’s point and why. On the whole I think
they are doing well, and I’m seeing that they are becoming more comfortable
with this new kind of reading.
As for Blau…. Well, I tried to experiment with his workshop
idea, where students create a definition of a class-specific writing genre that
will be practiced throughout a course by a process of consensus during a
discussion that builds a set of expectations for “writing within.” I thought I
would attempt to deepen the understanding of the genre of Medieval fixed form
chansons and an appropriate short style criticism essay identifying such a work
using some of the techniques Sullivan discusses in his article. I can’t say it
went particularly well, but I think there were specific reasons why – some of
the students had done the writing ahead of time, some had not; some students
had easily identified the piece, some had not. I think that Blau’s approach might
be a very valuable approach to helping students to understand the concept of
genre – extremely important in both music and writing – through the process of
developing a “form” for writing as a group, and I would like to try it again. I
think that next time, however, I will have them do the writing in class, and I
think it is important to attempt the essay BEFORE the students have had
previous experience writing this kind of response.
