The Problem with Composition

Part II: Design of the Course

A. Rationale

Writing about first year writing is a touchy thing. The deepest rifts in our field tend to be about teaching practices (practices some will call theory). But as literary scholar Gerald Graff asserts, we need to "teach the conflicts." Composition is ripe for problem-based learning because it is an acknowledged problem and source of real contention among disciplinary practitioners, university administrators, students, even the public, whose concern about "why Johnny can’t write" waxes and wanes across decades.

Most course rationales would begin with a quick description of the theory to which the writer/teacher ascribes: usually Expressivist (through Peter Elbow), Cognitivist (through Linda Flower’s and John Hayes’s work), and Social Epistemic (or a Ways of Reading/David Batholemae approach). Obviously this is an over simplification of a rich and diverse field, but since James Berlin so divided it in late 1988, in his article, "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class" we’ve sort of stuck with those categories and a generally process approach. In spite of the fact that some people now talk about a "post-process" pedagogy (Lee-Ann Kastman, for example)—my feeling, when talking to people from around the country at conferences, is that we still tend to have practices that are generally student-centered and process oriented (Donald Murray and Elbow) and that attempt to incorporate collaboration and group work (through the work of theorists like Kenneth Bruffe and John Trimbur). We have some theories, but what we mainly have is a set of practices, influenced by disciplinary discussions of theory, but shaped by local conditions that enable and constrain programs in very predictable ways.

What we generally know about composition courses: students don’t like them and are dissatisfied with their learning experiences in these courses. As a student from Princeton told The Chronicle of Higher Education, "I have never heard of anyone who had a good or even passable experience in their writing course." Students at North Dakota State are no different than Princeton students—at least in their feelings about the universally required course:

This student appropriately identifies typical student concerns with our university’s composition program: that the assignments are not challenging or meaningful for many students, and the "academic essay," the genre most taught in our composition courses, is a genre students are unlikely to need to master for success in other courses or the world of work. Obviously, the issues are vastly more complicated than this, and I don’t want to seem to undermine the excellent work my colleagues are doing or the successes they have had with students in programs that take a variety of traditional theoretical approaches.

However, I walked in to my first day of what we call a "trailer" section of English 120, and faced a very untraditional class. (These sections are called trailers because these students are taking the course out of sequence—meaning they were taking the class for the 2^nd time or more, and/or had taken its prerequisite English 110 for two or more times. In this class, I had only two first year students—both women who had tested out of their first semester course. The other 21 students were men, mainly sophomores and juniors.) Staring at me were two very enthusiastic and prepared young women, and 21 men who did not want to be there—who had had at least one negative experience with composition—resulting in a failure or a dropped class—and who were pretty sure this was going to be another bad experience.

My rationale was looking me in the face, as was my problem. I had students who needed to be engaged, and I had students who had vested interest in solving a problem. The problem was the course—the course that had failed them both literally and metaphorically at least one time previous. I fell into problem-based learning that day because I could see that as long as those 23 students had a problem, so did I. My rationale for adopting a problem-based approach to a first year writing course was entirely pragmatic; I didn’t need a theory of composition in order to teach these men and women, but a set of practices that could engage them in their education and attempt to convince them that their engagement could lead to change. That set of practices came from a campus initiative I was beginning to become interested in—PBL.

Because much of my own research concerns the dynamics of collaboration in creative partnerships, I already strongly believed that we (as first year teachers) need to begin helping our students develop the "soft" skills of teamwork, intellectual collaboration and creativity—skills that will not only ease their path through the university, but help them contribute in their communities and workplaces. Moreover, there is much to suggest that PBL and the research on cooperative education that informs it, is in many ways compatible with a social cognitive (see Linda Flower) and experiential education (see Bacon and Deans) turn that have recently gained more hold in composition studies. So while the notion of learning through engagement is not a new one in my field, it is not universally accepted as the most appropriate way to teach writing. However, because most first year writing programs are designed to meet a constellation of loosely related objectives, nearly a wish-list—as is our program—a well designed problem-based course can be a way of meeting course and program objectives even more completely than more traditional approaches.

B. Reflective Essay on the Content of the Course

English 120, as the second course in a yearlong writing sequence, has goals such as those that follow. Students will:

• Undertake research: locate, evaluate, document, and appropriately use diverse sources
• Summarize, analyze, and synthesize texts and data
• Write arguments appropriate for specific audiences and purposes
• Work productively on collaborative projects

Because such goals are based in the acquisition of writing and research skills, and the content of first year courses tends to be generic readings chosen by a program director or individual teacher, many programs, and ours is one, have no required content. Clearly, then, in spite of the fact that colleagues in the sciences, architecture, and engineering regularly ask how an English class can be problem-based, writing classes are nearly perfect fits for a PBL pedagogy: they have no necessary content (in many programs) and have goals that compliment the pedagogical aims of PBL.

In my class, the problem of the course itself was the one problem we focused our attention on the entire semester. Since my students thought NDSU’s composition program was not working for them, I asked them to redesign a program. (Please see my course web site: http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/ndsu/birmingh/pbl120/index.html for the problem, individual assignments, grading rubrics, and sample student papers). I told them that they were certainly not alone in thinking that the program needed some refreshing: our Provost and the Dean of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, as well as a variety of English faculty and our director of First Year English were in the process of rethinking the program—and would value student input. Moreover, I helped direct their research toward the changing nature of composition programs nationwide, to help them see that their work was part of a much larger movement rethinking the ways in which composition was being taught. But I also explained that students are never the only stakeholders in general education courses like composition, and so, I asked them to undertake their work as if they were members of the groups we identified as key shareholders: students, English teachers, teachers in other disciplines, administrators, and local employers.

Although our typical English 120 class asks students to write three 6-10 page researched essays, all individually, I asked students to undertake a wider variety of assignments in a greater variety of genres. They were assigned:

• a 2-3 page paper about their previous experiences with writing, comparing their experiences to the class as a whole through analyzing survey data
• a 3-4 page report researching a writing program at another university—individuals report and then a 3-4 page collaborative executive summary for each group of five
• a 3-4 page paper writing up an interview with a member of the student’s interest group—students also had to develop interview questions and a rationale for their questions
• a 6-8 page collaborative long report on survey data collected from their interest group—each group developed and tested a survey instrument, applied for and received an Institutional Review Board exemption, put their survey on the web, wrote a letter asking members of their interest group to take the survey, gathered, data, analyzed data, and wrote the report
• a 6-8 page collaborative proposal for a writing program that would meet the needs of all five interest groups
• a 3-4 page individual reflection on their learning experience

Although the students were acutely aware that I was asking more work of them than other teachers in other sections off the course, they also quickly became convinced they were doing important work that could reshape the way first year writing was taught.

C. Reflective Essay on Instructional Practice

Although colleagues in the sciences often wonder what PBL looks like in an English class, other English teachers tend to suggest that they don’t need to learn about PBL pedagogies because they "already do that." And while most writing teachers do embrace pedagogical practices that employ research, small group work, and minimal formal lecture while encouraging critical thinking and problem solving, there are significant differences between these classroom styles and a PBL classroom—and I think those differences are significant. Even in the context of minimal lecture, for example, classrooms can still be highly teacher-focused, if the teacher is leading discussion of assigned reading by asking questions—or even posing those questions to small groups. In addition, our disciplinary attention to a highly focused teacher response to individual student writing reinforces a teacher-focus—students become acutely aware that the teacher is their only "real" audience and seem to lose interest and ownership of their writing, often asking plaintively, "Just tell me what you want me to do." This sort of teacher-focus regularly occurs in classrooms that attempt to provide individual attention to student writing.

In contrast to this teacher-focus, PBL allows the writing teacher to design not only real-world problems, but real world audiences. Our Dean, Provost, and First Year English Committee were the ultimate audiences for the proposals that would come out of the class. But beyond this audience, the key to an effective PBL pedagogy is the problem solving cycle. Until I began reading about PBL, I know I had never had students begin their discussion of a new topic with what they already know. I think it was this part of the process that was able to hook my students; even though only 19% had responded positively to a prompt (on a writing apprehension test) that said, "I am a good writer," they all felt they knew a lot about composition and how it was taught at our university. On our first day of class, I couldn’t slow down that conversation. One student wrote about that first class in his final paper:

The day-to-day classroom activity was shaped by the students’ research projects and by the PBL process that begins with students responding to the problem by coming up with everything they know (or think they know) about it. The next step requires them to formulate what they do not yet know, but will need to know to solve the problem. After assigning group members research and discussing where to find information (and we spent significant class time on this), students begin research on their own, return and "teach" their research to the other students in the group before integrating that new information, reformulating new questions, and beginning the process again.

Because the students knew a lot about composition at our institution (78% were taking a composition class for the 3^rd or more time) but did not have any knowledge about the history that has shaped composition practices at NDSU and elsewhere, they began their work by reading an article by Karen Spear, "Controversy and Consensus in Freshman Writing." This article outlines the history of composition in the United States, and is a lengthy article my graduate class had complained about the semester before (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/review_of_higher_education/v020/20.3spear.html). I was impressed that the students had carefully read the article and had much to say about it. Because the students had a specific need for information—to create an argument for a new first year program—they found and read excellent material all semester.

Moreover, when it was time to research other programs, they contacted by e-mail and then conducted phone interviews with faculty from Iowa State University, University of Kansas, University of Minnesota, and Harvard—although the assignment in no way required this. In addition, members of the student interest group contacted friends at a variety of other colleges and universities, asking about their experiences in their first year writing courses. They wrote away for materials, investigated web sites, read university mission statements—all well beyond the necessities of the assignment. And when it was time to interview members of their interest groups, they fearlessly asked to interview five Deans, our Provost, three department chairs, and five professionals in local businesses, among a number of students, teachers and advisors.

Because the students were excited by the research they were doing, "show and tell" became part of the daily class routine—students would talk about their research discoveries, share sources of information, and even interview notes. Although they had started by teaching their group the material they uncovered, they quickly shifted and began sharing some information with the entire class as well as e-mailing me information to post on a class web site.

D. PBL Context and Evaluation

Because this class was so entirely problem-based and focused on the same problem across the semester, it is difficult for me to separate instructional practice from PBL pedagogy, but I will try to account for several issues I have not previously mentioned. To propose a solution to their problem, I had asked students to use a jigsaw model for group work, for although students worked much of the semester within interest groups, their final proposal required that attempt to respond to the needs of all stakeholders with their solution. But because the students had become very attached to their groups, they did not want to write with a new group; in fact, they rebelled at the suggestion that they reconfigure. So they elected instead to spend two class periods as "consultants" with other groups, filling those groups in on the information they had gathered about their own interest groups. While there is no question that the groups bonded well and were probably better able to write well together with the group they had been working with much of the semester, they were not able to effectively incorporate research from the other groups into their proposal. In spite of that, I was pleased with the students’ final projects, the students were proud of their work, and our dean was "interested and impressed" with their research. (As a parenthetical note: one of the groups was so cohesive that one of its members, a student who quit coming to class at midterm and ultimately failed the class, continued to attend group meetings outside class and was rated by his peers at the end of the semester as "excellent" in preparedness and ability to complete research tasks.)

Part III: Student Understanding

1. Evidence of Students Meeting Learning Objectives

Included with each of the assignments on the web are several examples of student responses to the assignments. The completed assignments I’ve put up represent typical responses; in fact, they are nearly randomly chosen, depending upon which happened to submit assignments electronically (and this would usually be students who were late with the assignment). Students were encouraged to seek input from me and other faculty members as they completed their projects and they worked very closely with other students in their groups to develop and support their ideas.

In addition to these sample essays, I used several other instruments to examine the success of the class and attempt to determine the extent to which students met learning goals. These instruments included:

• a survey of student engagement (a local adaptation of the nationally available standardized exam is being used in PBL courses at our university)
• a writing apprehension test to measure the change in students’ attitudes and perceptions about writing and their ability as writers
• SROI (Student Rating of Instruction)
• rubrics comparing primary traits in individual papers at the beginning and end of the semester (focus, organization, use of data, ease of expression, editing)

The data these instruments provide suggest that the class was successful in meeting the primary goals of the class: the survey of student engagement suggested that students believed that they had opportunities to work collaboratively and that they were overall, engaged in their learning experience. (The overall score in this first year course was higher than the score in my graduate seminar—the average score on this at NDSU, where it is used mainly in PBL classes, is 34-36. The score in this class was 44.3.) Although at the beginning of the class only 19% of the students had answered affirmatively to the prompt "I am a good writer," at the end of the semester only 4.6% (1 student) did not answer affirmatively.

My SROI (student rating of instruction) numbers, on a 5 point scale, averaged between 4.7 and 5—higher than I had ever had in a first year class. Students added positive comments, not about the class or the teacher, but about their learning—also something unusual for me. (There is space on our forms for student comments, but our students are not prompted in any way to write comments.) One student wrote, "Through all of the research we have done this semester, I have learned more than I have ever learned in one class before." Another student wrote, "I have developed some good skills in this class, like taking large quantities of information and breaking them down into manageable parts. . . . It’s nice to look back and see all of our hard work and see how much we accomplished." Finally, a students suggested that the course had been challenging, "I admit, I was kind of relieved to know that we wouldn’t be reading those dumb stories out of the textbooks. But I think that would have been easier."

Finally, when comparing primary traits in the students’ similar first and final essays (both personal essays responding to prompts about the topic of the class), I found significant improvement in focus and interpretation of data, slight improvement in organizational skills, and the same sorts and frequencies of problems with ease of expression and editing. I am not willing to say students wrote better at the end of the semester. I am convinced that they wrote with more confidence and had developed a more sophisticated understanding of the topic—an understanding that allowed them to take a more focused stand and supply data to support their points. What this tells me is that students write better and with more ease about topics they better understand. This is something we’ve known for a long time in composition studies, but strangely enough, we tend to ignore the many studies that suggest it and develop classes that do not have a specific content for students to explore, become familiar with, and respond to with writing tasks.

1. Reflection on the Evidence of Student Learning

Many students commented on the difficulty—the challenge—of the course in final papers or SROI’s. I do not think I had given enough credit to the complexity of their research until I went to on assessment in November. I heard a panel present on a capstone course in which seniors conducted exit interviews and designed surveys to undertake program assessment within their majors. And while the work presented was certainly interesting, I realized that my students were undertaking far more work and more sophisticated survey design than these seniors had. (My students collected 75+ pages of data per group when their web surveys were compiled—the group surveying students received over 500 completed surveys, the groups surveying teachers and administrators received over 135 completed surveys. They compiled more data than they could easily read, much less report upon, and they worked with our stats lab and group decision center to run various filters on the data to isolate responses by things like student GPA or teacher’s college on campus.) However, I think it was precisely because these students had been failed (most quite literally) by our composition program, that they felt an investment in undertaking this research and "fixing" the problem. So while this sounds like good news, in fact, when I taught this same problem the next semester to a class of real first year students—taking the course in sequence—they all did a reasonably good job. An equally good job, in fact, in terms of products. But they did not like the class. While the class scored high on the survey of student engagement, that is because the tasks require engagement, not because the students were interested or engaged. This second group of students began the class thinking they were good writers, and ended the class a little less certain of their abilities (not at all my goal). Students complained bitterly that the grading was too hard (even though I have an open revision policy)—although it was the same B- average the class the previous semester had earned, and in fact, the same B- average that is average for writing courses on our campus.

My SROI scores were much closer to my averages of 4.3-4.75, and the students’ comments reflected their (fairly good-natured) frustrations with the class. One wrote, "This would be a great course for students that are smart and interested and want to work very hard, and maybe learn more. But that would NOT be me. " A second student offered, "She grades too hard. When I work on something for more than two days, I want an A."

I am still trying to make sense of the differences between the two classes. Clearly, the first class, the class most disenfranchised from the writing program because of their low self-assessment of writing abilities (based on responses to the writing apprehension test) and their previous lack of success in the course sequence, felt more engaged by the problem. The second class, comprised of students who were more confident about their abilities, and who had had success with the writing program at NDSU, were not willing to take on the level of work and research required to complete this problem, even though they were students of similar ability. Perhaps one thing I can take from this experience is that while PBL clearly leads to a more engaged classroom and active learning, that students have very different responses to that engagement—and students who do not have an immediate reason to "buy into" the problem may be extremely frustrated by what they consider to be more or extra work that the course requires.

Although I am very committed to the learning opportunities a semester-long problem like this can offer, I am aware that in a general education course when students may choose any of 90 sections of this class, those who find themselves undertaking a project of this complexity may not be pleased. Perhaps that is why it is especially necessary to design problems that are meaningful to the students—or enough of the students that the interest and excitement of the class can help carry those whose own interest may fluctuate across the course of the semester. I know the students met the course goals both semesters. I would just have preferred they enjoyed doing so both times.

Part IV: Reflective Summary of the Course

Although PBL is being employed across a wider range of disciplines to help students meet learning goals in courses while developing group work and problem solving skills, I had not previously seen problems that asked students to engage in solving disciplinary problems—that is, the conflicts that shape our disciplines. Although first year writing is a universal requirement almost everywhere in the United States, students have little insight into why it is, what has shaped its history, and why they are now required to take it. The purpose of this portfolio is to describe a first year writing course taught using problem-based pedagogies and focusing on a single problem—that of the redesign of the course itself, across the whole semester. While this course was successful in meeting student learning goals both times I taught it—research suggests that writing improves as students become more familiar with the material about which they are writing—one group of students seemed to enjoy the class far more than the second. It seems likely that the students who felt most strongly engaged with the problem itself were more willing to take on the research and collaboration required by a problem-based approach. Students who had had previous success in a traditional classroom seemed to desire a more traditional pedagogy, while students who had not been successful in that environment were far more willing to put in extra work and time to understand and change the traditional classroom that had failed them.

Works Cited