English Team (UW System)

Welcome to our LSP blog!

Our Team:

• Terry Beck, English Department, UW La Crosse (beck.terr@uwlax.edu)
• Nancy Chick, English Department, UW Colleges (nchick@uwc.edu)
• Holly Hassel, English Department, UW Colleges (hhassel@uwc.edu)
• Aeron Haynie, English Department, UW Green Bay (hayniea@uwgb.edu)
• Bryan Kopp, English Department, UW La Crosse (kopp.brya@uwlax.edu)

-> Email our whole team at once: englishsotl@uwm.edu

STEP ONE NOTES

1. Who will be on your team? For each participant, record the person’s name, dept/unit, and email.
2. Briefly describe the course, its place in the curriculum, and the student population.
3. Optional: Submit a digital photograph of your team.

STEP TWO NOTES

1. What topic will your lesson focus on? Why did you choose this topic?
2. What specific learning goals will the lesson address? Write these in terms of what students will know and be able to do as a result of the lesson.
3. What long-term qualities will the lesson support? These are abilities, skills, dispositions, inclinations, sensibilities, values, etc. that you would like students to develop in your program.

STEP THREE NOTES

1. What are the steps of the lesson? Include descriptions of main activities, prompts, and estimated times for each part of the lesson.
2. In what ways was the lesson designed to help students achieve the learning goal?
3. Predict how students will respond to the lesson.

STEP FOUR NOTES

1. What kinds of evidence will be collected (e.g., student work and performance related to the learning goal)?
2. What aspects of teacher and student activity should observers focus on?

STEP FIVE NOTES

1. Summarize the evidence, identifying major patterns and tendencies in student performance.
2. Describe major findings and conclusions about what, how and why students met or did not meet learning goals.
3. Discuss any interesting or unexpected results.

STEP SIX NOTES

• As you repeat the lesson study process, describe changes in the lesson and the results of your study. (E.g., step 2--how you changed your goals; step 3--how you redesigned the lesson; step 4--what additional evidence you collected; step 5--what your new findings and conclusions are for the revised lesson.)
• Post changes to each step as “Comments” to your previous log entries.

Terry's Notes from 19 Nov 2004

Notes (by Terry Beck)  from 2nd English group meeting, SoTL in the Disciplines, November 19, 2004

Question:  How do we help students value and use complexity to construct understanding?

The 5 of us (Aeron Haynie, Nancy Chick, Holly Hassel, Bryan Kopp, & Terry Beck) will be doing a
Lesson Study together

Evidence of learning (possibilities)
* artifacts collected from students early in the semester by the lead instructor
* observer reports of student interactions during lesson
* videotapes of lesson
* student writing during sessions
* polished student writing collected after the lesson
* electronic discussions following (or during?) the lesson
* student survey/reflection
* pre-lesson/post-lesson on-line discussion

Draft of research plan
* We will use the Lesson Study format 
* We'll all think about texts that we'll be teaching, perhaps even look for a very commonly taught
text and brainstorm possible approaches to teaching it  , like
Texts suggested:
* "Yellow Wallpaper" 
* "My Pappa's Waltz"
* "Bartleby" 
* "Interchapters" from In Our Time 
* Lydia Davis short shorts
* "Cathedral" 
* "Girl"   
* "Where Have you Been" 
* "At a  Station in the Metro,"
* "Recitative" 
* Sherman Alexie's "My First Love" [on "My Pappa's Waltz]
[I think Bryan reported that we would be using "My Pappa's Waltz"—but I'm not sure that was
settled.]
* We will try to include a student researcher, once we've decided who the lead teacher is (the
student coming from that person's campus)
* We'll each go away thinking that we'll be the lead teacher
* We will continue to develop the plan through e-mail (with a meeting to be arranged if
necessary?).

Nancy's Report from 19 Nov 2004

SoTL in the Disciplines: 1st Group Discussion
November 19, 2004
Terry Beck, Nancy Chick, Holly Hassel, Aeron Haynie, & Bryan Kopp

We began by explaining our areas of specialization and what we teach.  Then, we took turns explaining our responses to the assigned questions to get us started.

II. 1.  List the set of questions/topics that your group proposed.
Bryan
· Rhetorical understanding (genre, purpose, audience; text <-> context relationship)
· Making interpretive leaps
· Close reading, inferential reasoning, "reading between the lines"
· Invention
· Writing with a purpose
Holly
· Misreading
Aeron
· Close readings beyond summary: complexity and the ambiguity of language, unpacking each word
· Reading with a sense of ideology of a text; recognizing a world view in a text, rather than decontextualizing it, seeing it only in terms of now, or seeing it just in terms of then and therefore irrelevant to now; reading very flatly
· Are students taking ideas and connecting them to their own lives and other discussions?
Nancy
· Contextualization
· Angry literature is "whining," no justification (no right to express anger…in lit)
· Authorial intention – the author's "intended" interpretation is "correct" only if the author meant it, consciously thought of it & recorded it somewhere
· Does how they read literature transfer to how they are in the world?
Terry
· Rhetorical understanding
· Failure to understand prose technique (ie, coherence – the integration of ideas) is a manifestation of a deeper issue, but the prose style is a way into that issue
Terry's last point focused the rest of our discussion.

II. 2.  Select 2-5 of these questions/topics/problems that your group finds particularly relevant/interesting/pertinent, and that potentially could be investigated in one of your courses on your own campus this spring semester.
[We seem to have honed in on one question/topic/problem….]

When students write incoherently, there's actually a larger issue of not even recognizing what coherence is – in part, it's a failure to understand nuances/differences and only understand similarities, not seeing complex connections.  So what do they think when they come to an "incoherent" or complex reading?

Other readings are meant to be reduced (memo, summary, talking points), and a literary act of reading does not, should not reduce or simplify.  Outside of class, what do students read…and why…and how?

What is the "love" or joy of reading literature?  Literature doesn't have happy endings, so it's not that kind of joy.  (Misconception alert!  Many think that literature—and thus literary learning--comes in nice, neat packages with pretty, red bows.)  It's the uncertainty, the discomfort.  The pleasure of reading hard/painful literature is sensing something is missing/absent/confused and trying to make meaning out of it.  It's the construction of knowledge, sensemaking, producing  meaning (reader response).

Aha!  Students often leave composition classes valuing unity and coherence (reduction, simplification, the 5-paragraph essay) of texts, whereas we hope they leave literature classes appreciating and understanding incoherence, difficulty, irreduceability—qualities of "good writing."  So while literature is posing a "problem" (complexity), composition seems to be offering the solution (simplicity).  However, this "problem" of literature is where we want students to be—to reside in that discomfort, to resist solving it and instead (as Randy Bass suggests) to see the "problem" as productive of meaning.  Similarly, composition classes don't necessarily seek reduction:  the invention stage, for example, is a messy, uncertain exploration of multiple meanings.

In-class vs. out-of-class writings may show this same polarity, as suggested in a poster at the IS-SOTL meeting in Indiana.  In-class writings (or online discussions) are messy, incoherent, expressive of confusion, focused on "problems," where as out-of-class writings (essays to be submitted) are polished, groomed, well-organized, reduced. 

Misreading, including literalism, can also be productive because it can bring on discussions of how to read more effectively, deeply for multi-layered meanings and complexity.

So what's our question?  Let's brainstorm some wording since we seem to have arrived at a common issue.
How do we get students to value complexity?  In reading and writing?  In the process of reading and writing?  In making meaning?  Is there anything we can do to help students value complexity in making meaning in the process of reading and writing?  How do we help students value and use complexity in reading and writing? Engage in complexity to construct understandings/meanings/ interpretations? Purposefully?

We discussed the use of difficulty logs (presented at IS-SOTL meeting) as a possible method to help students value complexity.  We can also model what we're looking for:  show our delight in interpretating complex texts, show our confusion, difficulty, uncertainty, and eventually productive readings.  Also, see Stephen Brookfield's book on discussion in which he suggests bringing a colleague to class to show debate & discussion & disagreement.  Also, think-alouds and transcripted think-alouds would be useful, showing our thoughts while reading by presenting a text in one font and our incoherent interpretations in another font.

We also discussed how this meaning-making is a social act, so we went back to our question:
How do we help students engage in complexity in reading and writing as they construct understanding as individual and social acts?
That's too clunky, and we're English professors, so we must come back to our wording in the afternoon session. 

[In the afternoon session, we eliminated the wordiness and kept the question more open-ended:  How do we help students value and use complexity to construct understanding?]

[One group member said there were lots of ideas about relevant theories, readings, and research (II. 3.) in our discussion, but I didn't record them mentally or textually. My apologies.  I do remember a few comments about how our question is constructivist at heart, but I don't recall any specifics.  Toni Morrison's The Dancing Mind and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands  also come to my mind: Morrison discusses what the mind does while reading, and Anzaldúa's text illustrates and confronts this ambiguity and complexity.]

Respectfully submitted by Nancy Chick

My Papa's Waltz

My Papa's Waltz Theodore Roethke

---

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother's countenance

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

From The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke by Theodore Roethke, published by Doubleday & Company, Inc. Copyright © 1966 by Beatrice Roethke. Used with permission.

Complexity Rubric

Hi, all. This is the rubric Holly & I made for this skill we're talking about.  We're Department Assessment Coordinators, and we had decided that our department would assess what our group talked about at the meeting in Milwaukee .  This was just a start, a way to keep us thinking about it, but this might help our group develop something for the fall Lesson Study in Aeron's class.

Nancy

Reading with and For Complexity

Explanation: One of the goals of a literature course is to encourage students to see nuances, texture, and multiple perspectives in the texts they read. Subsequently, this semester we are interested in assessing how students learn to read a text with the complex and ambiguous meaning-making process that will ideally happen in a literature course. The rubric below assesses the two prongs of the learning outcome: identifying passages that contribute to tensions and nuances in a piece, and acknowledging the ambiguities in a text as a source of richness rather than frustration. It will also continue to help us look at the ways students identify multiple meanings in a text, as we measured in our “close reading and interpretation” rubric in Fall 2004.

Proficiency: After taking a class in literature, students will identify key passages that contribute to textual complexity and acknowledge the value of ambiguities and tensions in a text. 

Students who read with complexity will do the following:

Performance Indicators	Exceeds Expectations	Meets Expectations	Fails to Meet Expectations
Identify multiple meanings	Thoughtfully summarize the basic meaning and recognize the multi-layered meanings of the text and its specific language	Accurately summarize the basic meaning of the text as a whole and its specific language	Do not recognize the literal meanings of the text or demonstrate confusion about its basic meanings
Identify passages that contribute to a text's complexity or ambiguity	Identify important passages of complexity or ambiguity in text	Recognize important passages of complexity or ambiguity in text when identified by others	Do not recognize or identify important passages of complexity or ambiguity in text
Acknowledge ambiguities	Identify ambiguities in text	Recognize ambiguities in text	Resist ambiguities in the text