Trust and Listening to Students

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Educators need to do a better job of inviting students to the water cooler. Yesterday, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece about the use of so-called plagiarism-detection software in dissertations — specifically, in my dissertation. My experience with having my dissertation submitted to Turnitin prior to my defense was used as the narrative that framed the report. I was interviewed for the piece, as were two of my dissertation committee members: Stephanie Vie and Jesse Stommel. Both have gone on the record about their dislike of plagiarism-detection systems, so it’s no real surprise that the Chronicle author reached out to them. That author also reached out to me, the doctoral candidate in her scenario, but the extent of my representation is this:

Mr. Friend had shown Ms. Vie many drafts of his dissertation, and he believed she would have noticed if anything suspicious had popped up. He thought it odd that Ms. Vie had to upload his work to the plagiarism-detection software company Turnitin.

That’s it. I “thought it odd.”

One of the major complaints about systems like Turnitin is that it treats students like criminals, suspecting them of misbehavior and asking them to prove their innocence by passing a systematic evaluation with an “similarity index” that is low enough to please the authorities. Turnitin uses a computer database to evaluate something very deeply personal: a student’s writing. By relying on such a system, universities show their students a lack of respect and trust. By not including a student voice in discussions of the effects of using Turnitin, we perpetuate the divide between those in the trusted inner circle and those trying to get in.

Yes, I acknowledge that the process of creating and defending a dissertation is very much an explicit part of the process of “getting in” to the academic circle. But by the time a student is a doctoral candidate — or, I would argue, a graduate student of any level – academia should treat them as members, not as mistrusted outsiders.

The mistrust implicit in these detection systems extends beyond the student, as well. By requiring my dissertation director to submit my work to Turnitin, my institution showed that it wanted the system to check the advisor and highlight any suspicious writing. To be fair to my university, their policy was fair and well-implemented, setting no arbitrary “similarity index” requirement and allowing the chair to interpret the results as she deemed appropriate. Other schools are worse in those regards. But my school still made submission compulsory, and that’s the part I take issue with: Turnitin gains value from the size of its database, and I was required to contribute my work to that database. The company that sells Turnitin profited from my labor, which I was forced to provide and which they get for free. Here’s what I told the author of the Chronicle article:

As the student, I resented the fact that I was forced to submit my work to a for-profit database, particularly in light of my conviction that my director paid enough attention to my writing that she would have done a better job “catching” plagiarism than Turnitin would have anyway.

This goes back to trust. I trusted my dissertation director to help me with my writing. I still do. I also trusted her to let me know if I wrote anything that would run afoul of academic or disciplinary standards of knowledge-sharing. Believe me: She put me through the wringer over how the writing-studies community employs APA style in terms of referencing other authors. Stephanie Vie is an amazing editor. But my institution made her submit my work to Turnitin, regardless of the care we had already taken to ensure its originality.

Or did we?

At the same time as I talk about my dissertation’s originality, I have to acknowledge the silliness of claiming “originality” for a type of document that is so heavily reliant on prior knowledge and so inherently constrained by expectations for form, content, structure, style, and approach. Dissertations aren’t actually original. They’ve been used for hundreds of years and in that time have developed certain expectations for length, argument, etc. Within a given discipline, dissertations have a certain typical outline that gets filled in with the student’s work, but that work is informed and constrained by the work of others in the field. Certain people have to be cited and acknowledged, or else the work is rejected as not being a part of the right conversation. Dissertations are not entirely original, and yet we ask students to submit them to originality detection systems. Requirements to submit dissertations to Turnitin are built on a misunderstanding of “originality” in academic writing.

Because a dissertation is a scholar’s initial efforts to join a conversation, those of us in academia need to work to make students part of that conversation as early and as often as possible, starting well before the dissertation and continuing after its submission and acceptance. We must ensure our students feel trusted and respected, and we must, as Jesse Stommel says, give them control of their own writing. If we don’t, students should demand such control over their own work and refuse to comply with institutional Turnitin requirements. That was something I didn’t feel prepared or empowered to do at my university, mostly because my path through my PhD program had already been protracted, and the second-largest public university in America seemed a rather large ship to steer. The last thing I wanted was a crisis or brouhaha so close to my graduation.

I may understand why my school’s administration chose to institute its Turnitin requirement, but I detest the unavoidable, compulsory nature of it, particularly at the precise moment in the career of a new scholar where they want nothing more than to be finished. We too often take advantage of the desperate urgency of our doctoral candidates. Instead, let’s meet them at the water cooler, invite them into the conversation, and start building mutual trust.

As a post-script, I want to add two points to the original Chronicle article:

1. My dissertation returned a 4% “similarity index” from Turnitin, essentially highlighting the block quotes and reference list. Stephanie and I laughed at its absurdity.
2. The article ends by accurately stating that I “earned [my] PhD in 2014 and started a job at Saint Leo University, where [I] teach writing.” I want to point out that I teach writing without the use of Turnitin.

Because I’ll be damned if I trust an algorithm over a shared respect with my students.

[Photo, “Imprisoned,” by Dara Meybodi, licensed CC BY 2.0.]

The Missing Link: Interventions for Enhancing Traditional Student Composition

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As the theme of this conference is technoliterate in(ter)ventions, I choose to present a call — or maybe a plea — for an intervention. I didn’t realize the need for the intervention until I left the environment of my graduate studies and found what I call the “little pond” in which the little fish presenting before you chooses to swim. You see, I went from graduate work and student teaching at UCF — a public, metropolitan, research-driven university with 60,000 students (the second-largest public university in the country) — to Saint Leo University — a rural, private, Catholic, liberal-arts teaching university with a campus of only 2,500 students. My current university is smaller than the high school I attended and later taught at.

But wait…there’s more. The composition courses I taught as a GTA at UCF followed the Writing About Writing curriculum spearheaded by Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, the latter of whom happens to be the chair of the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the school. In a sense, we were the cutting edge of that curriculum’s development, application, and expansion. Many of the terms highlighted in this weekend’s conversations were commonplace in departmental discussions and even course designs. Conferences like this one and CCCC resonated with me because they were in-sync with the work I was doing.

Then I moved just two hours down the highway to a school where I am the only faculty member who considers himself a compositionist, and that’s complicated by impostor syndrome and the fact that my degree was interdisciplinary. People ask if I’m the WPA. My response: “We have no WP for me to be the A of.” I work in an English department full of literature scholars, only some of whom are comfortable at all with the scholarship of rhetoric, to say nothing of digital rhetoric. Our curriculum comes right out of the 1960s. Whereas UCF’s classes explored issues of current research in rhetoric and composition, Saint Leo still teaches the modes. We expect a five-paragraph essay out of our first-semester comp students. Most teachers have a compare/contrast unit. The students write expository essays and often a process analysis.

This is the scenario I’ve been brought into. The struggle is real, people.

I hope that at this point it makes sense that I’ve spent most of this first school year trying to better understand our students and what the university expects of them (and vice-versa). I’m looking at the skills the students do and don’t have and comparing that to the standards set by the school. I’ve noticed two very frustrating issues that have largely been swept under the rug. First, students don’t need to be taught what our outdated curriculum teaches. The content of our 50-year-old curriculum has trickled down to the high-school level enough that our students can already do, in terms of form, what the course asks of them. That leads many teachers to frustrate themselves over matters of mechanics, rather than pushing students to learn new ways of composing. Our attention gets placed on things that help no one. But because you’re at this conference, you already know that.

The second problem is that our students lack flexible technoliteracies. They know how to use MS Word & PowerPoint because those standardized programs have become engrained in standardized secondary education systems. But they’ve not been exposed to collaborative writing tools, writing in digital spaces, or academic/professional uses of social media. They think that there’s only one way to write for school, which given their experiences probably equates to having one way of writing for anything more than social activities. Whereas my curriculum is stuck in the 1960s, my students are stuck with skills from the 1980s, plus access to Google. It’s a bit of a mess.

So that’s my troubling scenario. Now I’m going to go out on a limb and say that my scenario is far more common than seems obvious at conferences like these. People working for the thousands of teaching schools out there aren’t compelled to attend conferences and work on research to anywhere near the same degree as the prominent/dominant schools at these gatherings. We become, as John Silvestro suggested to me yesterday, the “silent majority”. I want to call attention to the limitations (of time, connection, and resources) faced by teaching schools that make it difficult, not only to keep up with current research, which should be expected, but also to implement that research and put it into pedagogical practice. To be clear, I am not calling for our research to slow down or for our scholarship to be completely accessible to freshmen. I’m highlighting the need for spaces where the gaps can be bridged, spaces where we specifically discuss the pedagogical how-tos of the theoretical how-comes. I’ll give an example in a minute.

I also want to go out on a limb and suggest that many of our incoming students lack some very fundamental technoliteracies that we all take for granted. When we implement cutting-edge theories of digital rhetorics in our first-year classrooms, we may be expecting more from our students than they are prepared to provide. Mary Stewart reminded me of one of Cheryl Ball’s keynote comments, about people who ask Kairos editors for help creating and archiving webtexts: They are asking for 20 years of situated, experiential knowledge. Much of the scholarship we see this weekend relies on similarly large amounts of disciplinary knowledge that we’ve spent years or decades acquiring. How much of that theory work can we apply to our first-year comp classes and expect it to benefit 18-year-olds who do all their work in Word and don’t know where to look to publish something online that’s bigger than a status update? We need to help ease them into the field, and first-year comp classes don’t often include the digital as part of their scope.

By way of example, let me talk about hyperlinks for a minute. I’ll confess that re-reading my proposal for this talk recently was embarrassing — all the sources I cited were from the early 2000s, but I think that’s relevant here: What my students need to know was being theorized back then. Aside from posts to social sites designed to curate external content (which of course has a value), my students have not composed online textual content that uses external content as support for their argument. They’ve used MLA Works Cited lists, but never the additional layer of metadata that hyperlinking can bring to a text. I’m suggesting that slowing down to explicitly teach students about hyperlinks — how to make them, how to implement them effectively, and how they enrich a text — would lay down some essential (and often overlooked) groundwork for the other work I hear people suggesting for students.

Teaching students how to make a hyperlink is a highly transferrable skill, working much the same way in Google Docs, Wordpress, Microsoft Word, and nearly any other program designed to create web-based content. Teaching students the rhetorical implications of embedding a hyperlink, rather than explicitly stating a URL, leads to conversations about authorial intent and reader assistance. When we get students who think the only way to cite a source is to use sentence-ending parentheticals referencing page numbers, we need to show them that linking from within a sentence can be more rhetorically strategic, more beneficial for the text and reader, and even influential to the systems that crawl the web. (Who can forget the delightful systematic manipulation of search engines that derived the phrase “Google bombing” from “George W. Bush” and “miserable failure”? Or how fun/challenging it was to Rick Roll people?)

I’m going to risk stating the obvious here, but I assert that the process, methodology, and rhetorical implications of hyperlinking should be an explicitly taught skill in every first-year comp class, regardless of institution type. The skill is too helpful for it to go untaught, and the tool too ubiquitous for it to go unused. Most of the impressive work done by the folks gathered for this conference rely on hyperlinking to exist; we need to bear in mind how important it is and not overlook the tool or assume our students already know how to use it. I call for a specific intervention for our students: Explicit hyperlinking instruction.

I’m also asking for a general intervention on behalf of smaller teaching institutions: Let’s find ways to ensure the important work of our field remains relevant and accessible to those who don’t have massive departments, massive budgets, or even graduate programs. Those of us at small schools should be talking specifically about ways we can help move our schools forward. You know, at least into the theories of the 1980s.

The Question of “Can We…?”

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I try to encourage freedom, creativity, and flexibility in any assignment in my classes. I try to create an atmosphere where students are comfortable—no, encouraged to—suggest alternate ways of doing things that will work better for them. Because to me, getting 72 identical copies of anything—from papers to graduates—is a very boring and bad thing. So I make a personal goal to create this kind of flexible environment that allows for adaptation to suit my students’ needs.

And you know what? That’s hard.

It’s hard to create that environment in a classroom because it conflicts with the general rule of what a classroom is: It’s supposedly this space where teachers say, “Let’s do X,” and then students do X, usually to earn the approval of the teacher. Trying to give students freedom to choose, alter, or even define what X is causes problems.

First, letting students determine the nature of the task they will perform involves a tremendous amount of risk on their part. They are putting their grades—the one piece of socially recognized currency they stand to earn in class—on the line. Because if the teacher is expecting a very particular or specific X, changing the task might lead to failure and a lack of credit because the student didn’t do quite what the teacher wanted.

I’m convinced this is a problem of setting expectations, and it’s exacerbated by years of students getting caught by a lack of clarity. Say, for instance, a teacher wants to read essays on a particular idea. The teacher tells students to write an essay. Clear enough, right? Then a student completes a 500-word, 5-paragraph paper as was the norm in middle school. The teacher, however, really meant something a bit more substantive by the word “essay”, so the student fails to earn credit. What the student wrote did not meet the [unspoken] teacher expectations.

The natural response to this is to clarify expectations. The assignment goes from, “write an essay,” to, “write a seven-paragraph, 1,250-word essay with a one-sentence thesis at the end of the first paragraph that addresses topic Y and makes an argument about it. The argument must incorporate the views of authors read in this chapter. Use Times New Roman 12-point type on 8½ × 11" 20-pound white paper. Submit with a cover page and following precise APA manuscript formatting guidelines. It is due at 10:29am on Thursday.”

Suddenly, in an effort to clarify or specify exactly what the teacher would like to see, that becomes the entire point of the assignment—the teacher. Completing the assignment becomes an exercise in following seemingly arbitrary requirements, rather than one of actually learning anything. Students have to worry about checking the minutiae of the assignment instead of the actual point or purpose. The teacher’s job, then, becomes dismally dull. When reviewing these papers, the specificity of the assignment ensures the task will be one of tedium. Every paper will be exactly the same.

It’s like baking a dozen chocolate-chip cookies, then sampling each one not for the flavor, but to compare it to some pre-defined standard model of “cookie”. You worry about texture, softness, and chocolate saturation, but there’s no chance to sit back and savor the deliciousness of the moment.

I want my students’ work to be delicious, and I want to savor each morsel of what I see.

So here’s where my problem with “Can I/we…?” questions comes in. If I give an assignment, I want my students to be free to achieve the goals of that assignment however they’d like. I tell them the goal, and that goal is what determines success or quality. Really, I want that goal to be more a determinant than I am, but that’s another post.

By way of example, I recently had my students introduce themselves to a colleague’s classes on Twitter. The instructions were pretty simple and straightforward: “We want you to meet one another. Send a tweet to introduce yourself to our classes. Include a picture so we can see who you are.” The assignment was intentionally simple, and it included clear goals: 1) Introduce yourself. 2) Include a picture. The rest was intentionally left open, and that vagueness created some questions that quickly became predictable because of how often students asked.

“What hashtag are we supposed to use?” (My class had an “official” hashtag, and my colleague’s classes had another.) The correct answer to this question, of course, is based on the intention of the student. Which class do you want to get the attention of? Should you tag both?

And then I started getting the questions that flummoxed me: “Can I say what music I like?” / “Can I include a picture of my dog?” / “Can we write back to them?” / “Can we post more than one photo?”

In each case, I had to bite my tongue from saying, “Of course!” in a dismissive tone that could easily have made it sound as though I was saying, “Like, duh!” Instead, I tried the measured approach of asking them what they wanted to do and how their idea would help them do it. In each case, the answer was yes. That was a default. But I wanted to make sure my students knew why they could do what they’d asked about, and more importantly, to see that however they wanted to achieve the goals of the assignment, they should go that route.

As I thought about it, though, I started to almost resent the fact that students asked these questions. It meant that, even with an assignment having a real audience and a real-world purpose, they still felt compelled to ask me permission before taking action. I was seen as their gatekeeper, determining what they could and couldn’t do.

Congratulations, previous teachers: You’ve taught students that they cannot make decisions on their own, and that taking a risk is a bad idea.

Ugh.

Can you include a picture of your dog? OF COURSE YOU CAN! I think the world needs more pictures of students’ dogs.

[Photo, “Permission granted,” by Sharon Drummond; licensed CC BY-NC-SA.]

Being a Problem Teacher

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Little things that escape conscious attention combine to create a statement about power and authority in the classroom. In my last classes, I narrowly succeeded in showing my students a small sign of trust. This post is brief, and it’s about something inconsequential, but I want to highlight how the smallest of gestures can reflect a larger philosophy.

I had explained the goals for our next activity. Students were to break themselves into groups based on topics they found interesting, and they needed to select readings from our textbook that they would then relate back to their topics. Everyone was ready, there were no questions, and…move.

In a couple classes, I almost intervened, helping students find one another and specifying which groups should meet in which corners of the room. I stopped just in time because things fell into place as I watched.

Let me rephrase that.

Students had the situation in hand. They had identified the problem and were on their way to solving it autonomously. All I had to do was get out of their way.

This is a challenge I face more often than I realize in my classes: My control-freak nature shows up all too often, and I believe I need to jump in and take charge, solving problems I see and making sure things move along smoothly. I want the show to look rehearsed.

But learning is messy, and students need experience working with mess. Every time I step in and solve a problem for them—particularly when I’ve not been asked to assist—my students lose some of their autonomy. Had I assigned spots in the room to each group, I would have set a precedent of control and suggested that I didn’t trust my students to manage the situation on their own.

One of my goals this semester is to get students to write more publicly, to find real audiences for their work. How could I possibly expect them to write for a real audience if I can’t even expect them to move desks around, find peers, and start a conversation without my help?

Something tells me this is one of those lessons I’d have learned a lot earlier if I had children. But this semester, I’m going to work on letting go—letting my students solve the problems of class, rather than trying to direct every effort.

[Photo, “Control freak,” by Matthijs. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA.]

Breaking Things: The Syllabus

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Typical first day: Students walk in, sit down, are handed syllabus, are read syllabus, depart.

My first day: Students received email prior to arrival, asking them to think of what they want to see in a syllabus. Students walk in, sit down, are asked to visit a Google Doc with lots of whitespace, are asked to list the things they want to see in a syllabus as the professor writes what he hears, are asked to weigh in on several parts and provide content for what remains.

We ran out of time, we had great discussions, much laughter was heard, and a couple jaws had to be picked up off the floor. Success…so far.

I wanted to learn what my students think are the most important parts of a syllabus. Last semester, I asked students to make a syllabus quiz based on the syllabus I had prepared and presented them. These quizzes showed me not what students thought was important, but what students thought I would think important…and that prioritizing information was not a natural instinct, especially with this particular document. Student-created quizzes emphasized specifics (like how often they should check their email) rather than principles (like which contact method is their best hope of reaching me). Their quizzes also used information almost exclusively from the first two pages of the syllabus, leaving the other eight or so relatively untouched. This was mostly due to available time in the class session, but there was also a bit of attention drift going on, as well: Students basically gave up after creating a few questions.

Last semester’s experiment with the syllabus was to break the student response to it—break the traditional syllabus quiz—but it left the syllabus itself completely untouched. Last semester’s experiment with the syllabus failed. Students didn’t pay any more attention to the critical parts of the syllabus, and my effort at getting them familiar with it meant only that they took a myopic approach to the most readily accessible material and completed the task without processing much. Three students this week, who have me for another semester, even said in our conversation about the contents of a syllabus, “But you didn’t have an attendance policy last semester.” I did. It was section 6.1, and it was about two paragraphs long. They didn’t know that because there was no value placed on it.

By contrast, this semester, they are creating the value that each section of the syllabus will have. By defining what goes in the document, they are shaping a document that they will value. For the record, I thought grades would be of primary, if not exclusive, importance. My first class astonished me by not mentioning grades until after eight or so other things made the list. With most other classes, grades were in the first two things mentioned. Grades for these students seem to serve one of two purposes. The one they hope for is reassurance. By getting grades on every. single. thing. they. submit., they can see that they are doing what’s expected and targeting their coveted A. But the other purpose of grades, the one they want to avoid, is accountability. If a grade reflects poorly on their work, it becomes a thing to challenge or complain about. If it’s a badge of completion, they support it. Students showed that they valued—or at least that they feel comfortable with—the framework of grades within a syllabus, setting the terms under which they engage the course.

So what do they want graded? Here again, answers took two tracks: The expected and the honest. Those who reported what they’re accustomed to said they wanted tests, quizzes, homework, exams, and projects graded. Those who were honest identified participation, effort, or “nothing” as their goals. Exams were particularly funny. Students volunteered the idea very readily. I looked at them and asked what their exam in a writing class would be like. Answers were shoddy and uncertain, usually including multiple-choice suggestions or generic essays. But when I asked, “So who likes/wants exams,” the response was even more predictable: silence. We agreed that we hate them, so we skipped them. I should have engaged them in discussion of what purpose exams serve, but the idea that a class about writing might not lend itself to an exam format was easily accepted.

Before I get to the two points every class wanted to see in the syllabus, I need to explain what I had told them about my plan for the course. I said that I have two main goals for the semester of Academic Writing II, highlighting two significant components of writing done in the academic world: 1) Academics routinely invoke the work of others. I want my students to become comfortable incorporating the ideas of other authors in their own writing. 2) Academics want their work to be shared and/or public. I want my students to think about their work engaging with a public audience. With those two goals in mind, I explained how the course would be structured and how our goal would be to submit three pieces for online publication over the course of the semester. To be clear: I want the writing they do to be for an audience outside the classroom.

Now back to the syllabus. After eliminating things they didn’t actually want (like homework and exams and cell phone use policies and such), what we ended up with, in each of my classes, were attendance and grading. They wanted me to tell them what I expected from their attendance, and they wanted me to tell them how I would measure their performance. We talked about what should be graded, and with fairly little discussion, we reached the conclusion that grading their writing wouldn’t work. They’re writing for a public audience that likely won’t include me. I’m not qualified to judge them. The editors of the venues they want to publish in sure can judge them. But not me (unless, as I explained to them, they want to submit something to my journal). So I’m not a qualified assessor, and their peers aren’t, either. We gave up on grading writing. We’d give feedback on it, and we’d work to improve it, but we wouldn’t grade it. What can we grade? Participation.

Once we honed in on that specific, I was able to make it approachable fairly simply. They have each worked in groups before. They have each had the experience of a student who slacks off and doesn’t pull their own weight. They know when someone doesn’t put in the effort. They’ve also watched as someone else in their group becomes a superhuman overachiever and puts it way more work than anyone else. They know when to reward one another. Suddenly, they have evaluation standards, they have experience with the situation and the measures, and they’ve been identified as the experts whose opinions we value. Perfect.

One student was vocally hesitant. He was basically afraid of being screwed by a vendetta. Our conversation led to me saying I’d look at the feedback and question the reviewers if things seemed off; additionally, any time I’ve done group feedback, the whole group presents an accurate measure even if one person unfairly hates or adores another. It works when they take it seriously.

Then the question of attendance policies. “After three absences, you lose points” was the standard initial statement. Several groups thought that sufficient as the complete policy, too. The questions I posed then were fun. “How many points?” “Points off of what? I thought we weren’t grading things.” “Three excused or unexcused absences? How many excused are okay? What if you play a sport? Can those be in addition?”

Alluvasudden my students thought of a sickly sports player who missed three classes for games, three classes (with doctor’s note!) for the flu, and then another three classes just because. You know, the three unexcused absences they were allowing. I also asked who wanted to record all the attendance information. The tedium and futility of a three-strikes policy, plus its incompatibility with a grade-free working environment, became clear.

Students worked to craft policies, with only two classes actually making significant headway. We’re finding, though, that policies here are less appropriate than principles. Students end up talking in terms of “be responsible” or “act like an adult.” I also heard a suggestion to notify peers before absences. The conversation went from punitive acts done by others to the transgressor and moved into motivations and intentions of the respectful and productive student. The focus was different, and they were far more thoughtful about the issue.

I’m hopeful that we’ll end up with an encouraging, supportive set of principles to shape the way our course runs. Day one was good.

[Photo, “breaking water”, licensed CC BY-SA by Petras Gagilas.]

Access, Politics, and Ethics in Course Modality

The creation of a law requiring all students to take online courses without first training instructors in effective online methodologies or pedagogies—and without allowing the existing school systems to implement these courses—allowed FLVS to essentially take over the system and define online education in the state. Most school districts (which in Florida follow the political boundaries of our 67 counties) did not have the resources to develop the curriculum or infrastructure needed to provide online classes. FLVS offered such a model at no cost to the districts.

Once the districts saw the profit involved in online learning, they re-evaluated those costs. Many began offering solutions that combined the FLVS course content with local teachers. These district-employed teachers received whatever training the local schools required, plus training in the content and interface through FLVS. This system of shared responsibility, a franchise, returned part of the profits of student completions back to the school district…after FLVS kept their portion for overhead, course development, technology support, etc. Interestingly, franchises run by school districts do not determine the course content. They teach whatever FLVS provides, creating a disconnect between the instructor and the content. If you’ve ever taught someone else’s unmodified assignments, you’re familiar with how jarring this can be. From the student’s perspective, an instructor disconnected from content seems ill-qualified, to put it politely. Students begin to see that their online experiences are an interface with the course designers, not the instructor. Their work is done because the system tells them to do it, not because their instructor

Publishing Student Work

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I’ve been teaching a FYC course on the research process for several semesters now. Each time through, I get a little bit closer to publicly posting the papers my students create. For now, I’m making a “class journal”—a large document formatted to resemble the academic journals my students have gathered research from and were asked to write their papers for. Their goal was to pretend like they were writing an academic journal article to report on their findings. I want to give them a journal to write in.

Two main sources inspired my approach: first, my department publishes Stylus: A Journal of First-Year Writing. It’s a collection of the best work done by students enrolled in our FYC courses, and it works with the annual Knights Write Showcase to provide greater visibility for writing classes and students across campus. Students involved in these two projects get a sense that their writing can exist—and be recognized—outside the classroom.

My second inspiration came from Cheryl Ball. In an article I cite far too often, she explains her grading system for a writing course. In short, as an editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, Ball understands the expectations of a “real” online publication and can apply those same standards to her students’ in-class work. She aims to have her students produce web texts that would warrant a “revise and resubmit” response from the editorial team.

Between these approaches exists an option I find very approachable: get my students to create academic research papers that qualify for “revise and resubmit” status with a print publication that journals first-year writing. This goal helps me see the endgame of my course, and it helps students feel like their work does more than sit in a pile on my desk. They’re writing to be published, not to be graded. I find the shift in priorities makes their work more real to them and better to me.

As part of this process, I typeset everyone’s final article in a format that looks more like a professional journal and less like a Microsoft Word template. I’ve heard a few comments from students about how impressed they are with their own work once they see it presented with more concern for design and readability. They’re so used to the drill of double-spaced draft text inside one-inch margins that when I show their work as print-ready, they rightfully feel like they—and their work—have grown up a bit.

The process can be tedious. I make sure the text looks consistent and present figures and tables (like data visualizations or results reports) the same way for each article, so I generally have to re-create their graphics. I do a bit of touch-up work on their reference lists, but a) I could go insane worrying about all the details from all my students’ papers, b) most of them use online reference-creation tools, which get close enough in my opinion, and c) we’re aiming for “revise and resubmit” here, not perfection. I want my course to be about the research process and about using writing to report on and work with that process, not about meticulous details of ever-changing citation standards. But I digress.

What I’m left with is a substantial document containing the best work of my students from the semester. I printed a copy of the one from this spring term, placed it in a three-ring binder, and set it on my desk in my office. This semester, that binder has served as a challenge: Remember how satisfying this was to create, and remember what you wanted to make better. Out-do yourself this time.

In the spring, that journal was a last-minute idea, just to experiment. Something about the way I approached that class made my students’ final papers much weaker than I had hoped. They didn’t write as much as I wanted them to, and their work didn’t feel as substantial as it should have been. My students understood the basic elements of the research process, but they needed more help and practice with reporting their findings and their learning. This semester, I’ve been determined to create final articles we can be proud of. It looks like it’s working, too. I showed some of last semester’s papers to this semester’s students, and they recognized that the work they’re doing this semester is much more substantial. They asked why the previous papers were so short. I took the blame: “Because I didn’t set them up right. I didn’t create the right expectations for their papers.”

I think my answer worked. It was an effort to make students realize that a) their predecessors were more capable than they appeared, and b) I generally do hold students to high standards. The papers I got that semester were more substantive, more interesting, more effective, and more professional. This process taught me the importance of thinking outside the classroom and of showing students examples of whatever it is I’m asking them to do.

The Technical Details

The layout process is tricky. I use LaTeX for my typesetting, and despite its popularity for scientific and mathematical writing, I’ve not been able to find a complete solution that allows for easy and automated creation of a journal containing documents by multiple authors. Starting from the work of Sven Siegmund, I’ve made small adjustments to his excellent Author per Chapter (aka Proceedings) document class and now use a customized class file that allows me to rather easily build my course journals.

Siegmund’s class file started with the standard memoir class and made the following changes (which I’m quoting right from his description):

1. Disables chapter numbering and also removes the "0." before section number
2. Writes the author and his home institute under the chapter title
3. Does not typeset the page number on the initial page of the chapter
4. Shows the short version of the chapter title in even head
5. Shows the author's name in the odd head
6. Shows the author's name above the chapter's title in the table of contents

My additions made further minor changes:

1. Resets section numbering with each new chapter, avoiding an awkward and recurring “5. Introduction” issue.
2. Removes the chapter number (which is always zero) from figure and table titles, avoiding the awkward “Figure 0.3” labels. Note that this change wreaks havoc with hyperref, making it impossible to link to different sections within the document.

I’m sure there are more-elegant solutions to the two minor changes I made, but I needed something that worked quickly and didn’t require me to get a degree in LaTeX while pursuing one in Texts & Technology, too. It looks like Siegmund hasn’t modified this document in four years; I need to contact him to see about posting this somewhere like Github to allow further improvements (or, as I hinted at above, to allow more elegant solutions to the problems I tried to fix/avoid).

To build the journal, I put the text of each student’s article in a separate .tex file, with no headers or anything. Individual source documents makes it easier to send each student and individualized proof to check layouts. (That’s the part they love because it makes them feel respected and legitimate.) I then use a basic outline journal document that inputs each student’s article as it compiles. Using what amounts to a contents list that inputs separate files for each student makes the editing and proofing process much simpler, and it makes compiling the final document just as easy.

When all my students have approved their proofs, I create a single PDF of the entire class journal and send it out to them. Because the page count quickly hits the triple digits, they feel they’ve contributed to something rather significant. That feeling goes well beyond the satisfaction of turning in a completed assignment or getting a good grade on a paper. It taps into their pride and bolsters their confidence—tough things to do when it comes to student writing.