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Exploring the Success and Failure of the Writer/Mentor Relationship in Constructing Text- Joe Valeri
Exploring the Success and Failure ...
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Exploring the Success and Failure of the Writer/Mentor Relationship in Constructing Text After a few weeks at the CLC I began subtly questioning my role there. I was a bit unsure of my role with Tanya, and I will try to present some of the ways in which I acted with my writer and how the writer/mentor relationship has failed and succeeded. Much of my paper analyzes a teacher/student relationship (rather than the writer/mentor one), especially in terms of the academic concepts I present, but I have found that a successful teacher/student classroom relationship, if developed appropriately, approaches the definitions that many of us attach to the writer/mentor relationship. That is, the distinctions between these seemingly different types of relationship are erased when teacher and student construct the type of interaction that I will describe later. I will present an article that describes how teacher/student relationships in the teaching of writing often fail, and it describes the issues surrounding negotiated meaning and how to construct it. My goal is to apply the ideas presented in this, and other, articles to the CLC and the work I did there. First, I discuss and evaluate my Rival Reading session with Tanya, and analyze ways in which it succeeds and fails. Negotiated meaning can also be considered a "shared space" between writer and mentor, and I discuss another article which explains the teacher/student relationship in a similar way. In this section, I look closely at text excerpts from a feedback session between Louisa, Chrissy, Nicole, and Michelle - and present examples of where the students are completely outside of the discourse the mentors are presenting as an appropriate framework. Finally, I discuss Profile writing and its overall success. This section examines the technique of scaffolding, and highlights the success and reasons for success when a third or "shared space" is negotiated between writer and mentor. Joe and Tanya - Rival Reading Session at the CLC Before examining the writers at the CLC and the work I did there, I would like to discuss writing and the teaching of writing in broader terms. Writing is an extremely important method of communication, and it certainly is a very important skill to have. In Contexts for Learning to Write, Arthur Applebee and Judith Langer examine some of the practices for teaching writing in the high school setting and provide a framework for improvement. This gives me a chance to find out some of what is right and wrong in the area of teaching high school students to write, and to view what I did at the CLC inside a semi - evaluative context. Much of the article examines what is wrong in the teaching of writing, not what goes right, but it gave me something to keep in mind during the last few weeks at the CLC, and in retrospect it provides a framework for evaluation. It also tries to answer questions of why a particular style of teaching does not work. They found that most of the writing assignments were short - providing only a topic, a length, and a due date. And detailed instruction for successful completion of the assignment came only after it was graded and returned with comments, not in the assignment given. One of the problems with this is that the writing is a summary of previous learning. That is, the teachers ask the students to present what they already know in terms of form and organization and in terms of what they have "learned" from or about a book or class discussion. What does not happen in these instances is engagement of the student in a process of learning because it binds the student more to writing technique and English skills; it asks more for text completion than text construction. Applebee and Langer found one exception to this pattern in a classroom where the students were much more engaged in the activity of exploring their own ideas. The teacher made the assumption that the students might actually have something worth sharing, something of interest to them, and this interest gave purpose to their writing. In the class the students "are allowed to take an active role in determining what will be said" (171). Thus the meaning of communication "that develops is negotiated among all participants, teacher and student alike" (171). Typically, writing assignments that are designed to evaluate the student are one-sided; that is, the teacher's meanings and purposes are held as more valuable than the student's are. It is not a negotiation of meaning. In most forms of communication (outside of school) like everyday conversations, people driving on the highway, a clerk and a customer in a store, the meaning is negotiated, and no one takes a preemptive strike over another. However, to perform in a school setting, the writer must be successful inside the parameters established by the teacher; and this can be very constricting. More often that not, the teacher has good intentions, but when the meaning is not naturally negotiated, "the structure of the interaction inevitable breaks down and the instructional goals are subverted." Negotiated meaning is both externally and internally constructed, and when successfully executed it often pulls many voices from various sources into the discussion to broaden the scope of the meaning. This does not only happen in an open dialog setting where individuals bring their own goals and purposes, but "negotiation is also an internal process by which writers construct (rather than defend) personal, but socially situated meanings" (Flower, 66). The key words here are that writers construct rather than defend - which means they are not simply arguing or defending their viewpoint, but shaping it by including rival perspectives. Flower also points out that "outer forces...appear as inner voices, speaking in conjunction [italics added] with the writer's own goals and available knowledge. As these forces open doors, promote options and suggest action, they may come in conflict. Writers who choose...to entertain and attend to this conflict...enter into the construction of negotiated meaning" (Flower, 67). There are also problems that arise while constructing meaning, and the solutions to those are not so easy to find. Both Flower and Applebee and Langer explain some of the ways in which even skillful construction can fail, and they try to find out what happens when they do. Applebee and Langer cite one student who had trouble responding to her teacher's writing assignment. When asked what she would choose to write about the book, her response was similar to the teacher's assignment, but the student felt as if she would be in control of the paper if she had chosen her own topic. That is, "the form would derive from what she felt it important to say," and "she would be in control of where the essay was going" (Applebee, 174). Had she been allowed to prescribe her own essay topic, the power and control in the negotiation of meaning would have shifted to a more balanced representation. To this point, my discussion and exploration of these issues has been fairly broad, but the goal is to connect them to the CLC and my relationship with my writer, Tanya. First, I would like to discuss the first activity Tanya and I did together - the Rival Readings exercise. We read a text about a man named Gary, and it described his life in terms of work and family, and then revealed that he eventually had a drug problem. The object of the exercise was to use each other to construct a negotiated interpretation of the text, to rival one another to see if we could develop several possible interpretations in order to have a well-rounded and broad idea of what was going on. In this exercise there was no actual text construction, but it certainly gave us a chance to practice negotiating and rivaling. Considering Applebee and Langer's methods, I will evaluate certain times where meaning was negotiated - both unsuccessfully and successfully. Something that happened fairly often in our discussion is that the meanings I assigned to the text preempted Tanya's without me even realizing what I was doing: Joe [talking about Gary]: Was he working hard? Tanya: Yeah. Joe: Trying his best. Tanya: mmhmm Joe: And then, seems like after awhile he was making some money. Tanya: Yeah. Joe: And he was investing in some stocks and stuff like that. Tanya: mmhmm ... Joe: He was doing pretty well. Tanya: Yeah. During this part of the discussion Tanya was supposed to be explaining her interpretation to me. However, all she said was "yeah" and "mmhmm." This is a perfect example of me assuming my interpretation was the correct one, assigning it to her, and letting her agree. That is not to say that she did not necessarily agree, but if she thought as I did, there are better techniques I could have used to get her to say so. For example: Joe: How did he do financially at his job do you think? [silence] Joe: Did he seem to make a lot of money? Or did he seem to not make too much? Tanya: I don't think he made too much. Maybe I think he wanted some more money. The second questions I asked did not seek a yes or no answer, and they did not leave much room for "I don't know." Instead, they resulted in Tanya revealing two ideas about the story. And since she was hesitant or unsure at first, I went one more step and gave her some choices - rather than just one choice as in the previous examples where she merely had to answer "yeah." Further into our discussion, Tanya became much more involved, to the point where she even contributed more than I did, and there are a few fundamental differences in the conversation that contributed to this switch. Most importantly, we got the discussion of what the story was literally about out of the way early. Before we probed into stories behind the story or extended rival readings, we established a pretty basic chronology of events and list of characters and actions. What this did was move the discussion out of an academic question-and-answer session into a more conversational tone where no one was particularly dominant. To emphasize this point, I explained to her what the activity was about: "if we went down into these next questions we might find some different ways that we interpreted the story, we can try to build an interpretation together. See what kinds of things we both noticed. Things that you noticed that I didn't see and that I noticed that you might not have seen." Also, my attitude towards the questions presented changed. Instead of asking the questions to Tanya, I began asking them to us. It put me into a role similar to hers in that we were both situated on the same side of the discussion, rather than me asking her questions and evaluating her answers. The tone of the discussion became more casual and it was as if we were just chatting about a TV show we had both seen rather than me asking about a story I had given her to read. I was answering the questions (or trying to figure out the answers) with her. Similarly, the questions in the exercise changed, and this also contributed to the switch in our discussion. The first kind of questions were more factual, dealing with what literally happened, who was involved, et cetera, while the following questions probed more into why, what do you think caused this or that to happen. I also asked questions that Tanya could answer from personal experience rather than directly from the text: have you encountered stories like this before, rich or poor people, how do their families react? These sort of questions have no right or wrong answers, and they ask Tanya to think about her own life, her own experiences, rather than pulling answers out of a text. Instead of filling in the blanks with what are supposed to be the "right answers" she was constructing her own answers from her own thoughts and sharing them with me. The difference in the first part of our conversation and the second part was that my meanings and purposes became less important, we abandoned a strictly academic attitude, and instead we constructed a negotiated or shared meaning for discussing the text. The discussion was more about Tanya, and the overall control and power was more appropriately balanced. Louisa, Chrissy, Nicole, Michelle - Profile Feedback Session at the CLC Another way of looking at negotiated meaning (or non-negotiated meaning) is by applying "the notion of script and counterscript as a heuristic" for evaluating classroom practices, or, in our case, text construction between writers and mentors, as Kris Gutierrez, Betsey Rymes, and Joanne Larson do in their article "Script, Counterscript, and Underlife in the Classroom" (445). The purpose of their article is to examine the power structures of the classroom and how power is established through teaching and through teacher/student dialog. They establish a social space in which teacher and students reside almost exclusively in their own teacher script and student counterscripts, respectively. They "illustrate how the teacher's power on the classroom...is maintained through a form of monologism that attempts to stifle dialog and interaction... The monologic script, the primary script in the classroom..., appears to be exclusively in control of the teacher whose own socialization reflects the dominant cultural values invoked in schools" (446). Some students participate in the dominant script, but others who do not, who stray from the established rules, form the counterscript. All participants in the classroom hold their own base of knowledge and expertise. The space for a counterscript to develop occurs when the teacher's prescribed knowledge "regularly displaces the local and culturally varied knowledge of the students" (447). The third available space, Gutierrez, Rymes, and Larson argue, appears when both students and teacher step outside of their scripts and form a true dialog, a space for "unscripted improvisation," where typical established roles are disrupted (453). What becomes extremely important here is that students do not simply enter the teacher script because that simply accentuates the improper roles established as classroom status quo. What often happens when this occurs is that the teacher constructs his or her script and it becomes the only one used in the activity. The teacher "presents his [or her] internalized cultural discourse neither as his [or her] own individual view, nor as a [specific] rendering of knowledge," but rather as absolute and unquestionable (455). I will use an excerpt from a CLC feedback session to demonstrate how this happens. I will use the terms teacher script and student script even though we used the terms mentor and writer - just to be consistent with the article. At the beginning of the discussion, Chrissy says "All of this feedback is to make your profile as good as it can possibly be" which establishes the teacher script right away. Oftentimes, Michelle and Nicole enter rather successfully into the teacher script - so this excerpt is not necessarily indicative of the entire discussion: Michelle: I wanna know why this right here is here. Chrissy: Read it out loud. Michelle: Why is this here? Chrissy: The last part? What, "one of the things I will have to overcome?" Nicole: Because I need to do that if I want to get a job. Cuz somebody saying something, they think I be listening, but I really don't. I just think about other stuff I wanna listen to. Louisa [to Michelle]: Why did that bother you? Michelle: Because I was thinking if I was the boss I would wanna, I'd be thinking I would want her to be listening to me. Nicole: I mean, sometimes people just sit there and I look at 'em, except I don't be listening. Chrissy: Right, but what Michelle is saying is that as a boss she doesn't want to know that. Louisa: See, Michelle thinks a lot about audience, I don't know if you realize that...She really thinks about who's gonna read it...and how it's gonna come across, so that's where I think that question came from... Chrissy: Michelle, do you think it would change the way - cuz we talked some about this. Do you think it would change the way you as an employer would read that if you heard Nicole say some way that she would try to overcome that?... Michelle: I don't get the question. Chrissy: Okay, in your working plan you talk about overcoming nervousness, okay. And that asking for a solo part might help you overcome that, okay. Would it help you as an employer if Nicole had a thing that she could do to overcome that? Michelle: mmhmm Chrissy: Yeah? Okay. Nicole: I put that I would try to overcome that so he would not fire me cuss I wasn't listening to him. He would know that I was trying. Chrissy: I see, so you're working on it as a please-understand-me mode. Nicole: I mean, I don't have no problems or nothing, it's just that I don't be listenin' to people. That's why I put that there. You don't under stand that [inaudible] Chrissy: I do, but I'm trying to think of it from a- Nicole: I mean cuz they might think I have some kind of mental disorder or something, but it's not that. Louisa: That's not what I was thinkin'. Nicole: Some people might think that. Chrissy: Yeah, I don't know what to do about it cuz I think it's a really honest good point. Louisa: I do too. Chrissy: But I don't- Nicole: So what are we trying to say? Louisa: Exactly. I don't know. It depends on who reads it. We can't predict what everybody's gonna say. Chrissy: But, no, that's one of the reasons we get feedback. Nicole: He would think I was being honest - that I was an honest person. Louisa: Yeah, I think some people would. But then I think Michelle saying "Hey why is this here" is a really valid point that I think some people would ask as well. Nicole: It's there cuz I put it there. Michelle laughs Chrissy: Maybe, what if there were another line at the end there that said something like, um, I'm currently working on this, but I hope that until I get better about it my employers are understanding that I'm trying. Nicole: It's making me sound crazy. Louisa: It doesn't make- Nicole: Yes it does. Like I'm trying to overcome it like Chrissy: Aren't you?! Nicole: It's like I have problems and can't overcome my problems. Louisa: Well, ya know, Michelle actually had kind of a similar thing going on, and lemme, this is so, lemme tell you real quick. Ya know the part where she's talking about, um, babysitting her brother? Nicole: Uh-huh Louisa: Okay. Remember when we were talking about that, and I said, "Oh do you wanna talk about how much you like it," and she said, "No, I really don't like it." But then she said "I don't wanna say that in case somebody might wanna hire me as a babysitter." Ya know, these, ya know, she's choosing very carefully what to put in and what to put out. I think it's kinda like the same problem in a way. Nicole: mmhmm This is a section where the mentors are stuck in their teacher script, and the writers are completely unable to even join them in that script. One of the broadest assumptions that the mentors make (and can't really help making in this case) is that Nicole is interested in improving her profile and working plan. The entire discussion is centered on the assumption that the writers want feedback from their mentors, and the mentors stay within those parameters the whole time. It seems like the revision process is almost foreign to the writers, and it might have been necessary to explain to them what feedback is, why it is useful, and how they can successfully go about evaluating and improving their own and each other's writing. The mentors do not pick up on the fact that Nicole does not understand the criticism and feedback idea. She is not engaged in a discussion of her writing with them; instead, she is defending what she has written. The mentors are used to a more open discussion and techniques of evaluation and revision, while Nicole knows exactly why she included that particular line in her profile and does not realize that people might interpret it differently than she intended. It might appear as if she is talking within the same context as the mentors, and during the discussion it would have been nearly impossible to recognize that she was not. In my interview, I asked her if she changed anything in her Profile and she told me that she did not change anything after all. Again, the teacher script is a discourse of evaluation and revision, and Nicole's counterscript is a defensive and explanatory one - a counterscript that feels like her profile is what it is and does not need to be changed. By the end, she has resorted to phrases like "So what are we trying to say," "It's there cuz I put it there," and finally "Uh-huh" and "mmhmm." This could very well be a fundamental flaw that existed from the beginning of the conversation that neither the mentors nor the writers realized. Michelle begins by trying to fit into the teacher script, but by the end is completely silent: a counterscript in itself. The last two comments she makes are "I don't get the question" and "mmhmm." Since the mentors are not speaking directly to her or about her profile, she is not in Nicole's counterscript, but since she is not included in the teacher script she fades completely out of the conversation midway through. This particular counterscript of silence also occupies Nicole in other parts the conversation. I asked her what she was thinking during a particular part of the conversation when Chrissy and Louisa were talking to Michelle at length about her writing, and Nicole said she was even not listening. The next question I ask is How can this change? "The role of the teacher must shift, from an evaluator of what has already been learned to a collaborator who can help the student accomplish more complicated or sophisticated purposes" (Applebee and Langer179). In the case of our CLC feedback sessions, the students need to be taught the importance of revision and how the strategy of feedback and revision works. In the next section, I will examine how this process takes place and look at the successes of the Profile writing activity. Profile Construction at the CLC Overall, Profile writing was very successful, and the writers enjoyed it. Obviously, that was the goal of the entire program, and presumably the writers were here because they wanted to be. The profiles belong to them, and the profiles are about them; this is the biggest difference between the Profiles and typical academic or classroom writing. Nicole told me that the Profile was much more enjoyable than an essay for school because it was about her, and Tiffany echoed her sentiments, saying that it was easier than schoolwork because she knew what she was writing about. Similarly, Nicole said that composing the script for the Community Conversation was a positive exercise. I asked Tiffany and Nicole the following question: Who wrote your profile - you, your mentor, or both? The answers were "me," with both of them leaning a little bit towards "both," and I was told that they could have done it without us, but that we certainly helped, and their Profiles are better because of our contributions. So success is not simply achieved by finding something that interests the students and telling them to write about it; there still is a role for teachers or mentors to play in that relationship. The next section of my paper tries to discover what that role is. Applebee and Langer define this role as "one of providing instructional support or scaffolding that will allow the students to undertake new and more difficult tasks. These tasks are purposeful for the students because they grow out of what the students want to do, but cannot do without the teacher's help" (176). They argue that appropriate interaction leads to the development, and eventual internalization, of certain cultural knowledge. In this way, teachers provide students with methods and techniques of crafting their writing, and through this process, these strategies become part of what I have been calling the "third space." Eventually, these strategies become embedded in the student's script. This process works in both directions because the teacher or mentor gets a better feel for what the student hopes to learn and explore: the student's local knowledge becomes visible to the teacher, and hopefully this can become part of the teacher's script - which previously did not include that knowledge. Conducting an inquiry, for example, is a perfect way to expand the mentor's knowledge or script. By spending adequate time in the third space teacher and student construct a shared classroom script. This type of relationship is exactly what Nicole and Tiffany described to me when I asked them about writing their profiles. "Because writing is a communicative act, it's very essence is the writer's message; that message embodies what the writer wishes to say to a particular audience for a particular purpose" (Applebee and Langer, 179). The scripts for the Community Conversation and the Profiles for the UYTP are for a particular audience, and the CLC writers had certain ideas that they wanted to address to those audiences. My feedback session with Tanya and another writer/mentor pair was almost completely worthless, and Nicole's feedback session was less productive than her other writing activities. The articles by Applebee and Langer, Flower, and Gutierrez, Rymes, and Larson enabled me to sort out the differences between the feedback activities and the Profile activities, and pinpoint specifically in the text how and why certain interactions between writer and mentor failed or succeeded. I discovered how negotiated meaning is necessary to even communicate properly with the writers, and I was able to evaluate my own performance in the Rival Reading session with Tanya. The feedback sessions are fundamentally flawed because they put the students in a discourse or teacher script with which they are unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Although this essay tends to focus more on the negatives or inconsistencies in our work at the CLC, I also tried to highlight a small part of how we were largely successful. Also, it is typically easier to see why some techniques or activities work than why others do not. From the beginning of the semester I was a bit unsure of what my role really was and how my relationship with my partner was to be developed and pursued. This inquiry project has certainly assured me of the things I did correctly and helped me rethink those things which may have failed or were executed unsuccessfully. It has given me a base of knowledge and understanding of writing, teaching writing, and collaboration that I will continue to use in the future; it has pushed my academic pursuit of this knowledge to a higher level, exposed me to a new vocabulary and ways of thinking, learning, and teaching; and it has introduced me to a field of study which can be very beneficial and rewarding to pursue. Works Cited Applebee, Arthur, and Langler, Judith, "Language, Learning, and Interaction: A Framework for improving the teaching of Writing" in Contexts for Learning to Write, Applebee, Arthur, Ablex Publishing Company, New Jersey, 1984. Flower, Linda, The Contruction of Negotiated Meaning: A Social Critique Theory of Writing, Carbondale, Southern Illinois Universtity Press, 1994. Gutierrez, Kris, Rymes, Betsey, and larson, Janne, "Script, Counterscript, and Underlife in the Classroom: James Brown versus Brown vs. Board of Education," Harvard Educational Review, Volume 65, 1995, 445-471. |