Interdisciplinary Writing Through Multidisciplinary Writing
Interdisciplinary Writingthrough MultidisciplinaryWritingRiv-Ellen PrellTechnical Report SeriesNo. 3 1993Lillian Bridwell-Bowles,Series Editor
Interdisciplinary Writingthrough MultidisciplinaryWritingRiv-Ellen PrellTechnical Report SeriesNo. 3 1993Lillian Bridwell-Bowles,Series EditorSusan Batchelder & Mark Olson, Editors
THE CENTER FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES OF WRITINGUNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA227 LIND HALL207 CHURCH STREET S.E.MINNEAPOLIS, MN 55455Director:Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, Professor, EnglishResearch Assistants:Susan Batchelder, Craig Hansen, Mark Olson, Paul PriorPolicy Board:Chris Anson, Associate Professor, English; TerenceCollins, Professor, General College; Jeffrey Derby,Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering; GeraldRinehart, Director of Undergraduate Studies, CarlsonSchool of Management; Billie Wahlstrom, Professor,Rhetoric;Copyright 1993 by The Board of Regents, University of MinnesotaAll Rights ReservedISBN 1-881221-06-7The University of Minnesota is committed to the policy that all personnel shall haveequal access to its programs, facilities, and employment without regard to race, color,creed, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, disability, public assistance status,veteran status, or sexual orientation.
PrefaceIn this report, Riv-Ellen Prell and her colleagues describe their “real-world”experience with trying to turn American Studies 3112, American Everyday Life, into a“writing-intensive” course, complete with successes and innumerable “challenges.” Theirwork should be of interest to all faculty members who try to comply with the Council onLiberal Education’s announcement that all students at the University of Minnesota shouldtake four writing- intensive courses before they graduate.One of the most striking observations offered by this report is the reaction thatstudents had to a course that would expect them to write. Prell reports that there wereover ninety students interested in taking the course, but once the syllabus published thefact that they would have to produce a significant amount of writing, fewer than thirtyremained by the end of the first week. Prell is a highly respected teacher in the AmericanStudies Department, and students are attracted to her courses. We take her account assignificant evidence that writing is often missing from the curriculum at the University,and that students, sometimes for understandable reasons, seek “the path of leastresistance” when they have the option of taking courses that are less demanding.This technical report appears in a series of informal papers published by the Center forInterdisciplinary Studies of Writing at the University of Minnesota. The Center annuallyfunds projects proposed by University of Minnesota faculty to study any of the followingtopics: characteristics of writing across the University’s curriculum; status reports on students’ writing ability at the University; the connections between writing and learning in all fields;
the characteristics of writing beyond the academy; the effects of ethnicity , race, class, and gender on writing; and curricular reform through writing.One of the goals of the Center is to disseminate the results of its funded projectsas broadly as possible within the University community and at a national level. Weencourage discussion of Professor Prell’s findings and interpretations, and we invite youto contact the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Writing for information about otherpublications or Center activities.Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, Series EditorSusan Batchelder and Mark Olson, EditorsDecember 1993
This report summarizes our experience revising American Studies 3112,American Everyday Life, to include a writing-intensive component. In addition, itdescribes future directions for incorporating writing into a course that has requiredminimal writing in the past.The curriculum of the course we revised attempted to balance (rather thanfundamentally transform) course content between experiences of white men and womenwith experiences of people of color within the United States, but our conclusions are inno way particular to matters of cultural pluralism. Indeed, one of our most successfulstrategies focused on students’ understanding their own experiences, which wereoverwhelmingly white, European-American, and middle class.We are interested in describing and reflecting on the experience of the course, itssuccesses and failures, as a vehicle to analyze writing within an interdisciplinary coursethat had integrating theory and everyday life as its purpose and race, gender, and to someextent, class as its focus.The Proposal: Interdisciplinary Writing through Multidisciplinary WritingRiv-Ellen Prell proposed a revision of American Studies 3112, AmericanEveryday Life, to the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Writing. The originalproposal requested funding to structure the course to encourage students to write in avariety of “genres” which would directly imitate the ones under study. Providing studentswith a variety of writing experiences promised to allow them to reflect on the type ofwriting they did best, why it was successful for them, and to strengthen all areas of theirwriting. These forms of writing were also tied to a variety of types of research—historical, ethnographic, cultural criticism, and TV criticism. The class also was designed
2Prellto teach students how to integrate theory with ordinary experience with the hope ofdeepening their ability to read critically and to reason.Research funds were used to hire two research assistants, Jeanne Halgren Kildeand Amy Farrell, both graduate students in American Studies with considerableexperience in teaching composition. We spent approximately four months designing thecourse and the writing exercises, and together we produced a syllabus that located fourareas within everyday life for discussion: families, work, desire, and U.S. television. Eachof these four areas was keyed to a writing assignment that required some small amount ofhands-on research—reading historical magazines, observing human behavior, andwatching television. One involved a journalistic or fictional assignment based on one’sown experiences at work.Throughout the course we consulted with Lillian Bridwell- Bowles. Her input wastremendously important in helping us understand how to ask people to write, andparticularly how to write to a specific audience.The CourseAmerican Everyday Life was assigned a teaching assistant, Elizabeth Anderson, agraduate student in American Studies, allowing enrollment to open to seventy-fivestudents; five more signed up on the waiting list. The first day the students received theirlengthy and explicit syllabi and met what we called the “teaching staff.” By the secondweek fewer than thirty students remained in the class. This was more striking than itinitially appears because on the second day of class at least twenty new people appearedto replace ones who left the first day, including the many students who left the roombefore I even spoke. I would not be exaggerating to say that some ninety students
Interdisciplinary Writing Through Multidisciplinary Writing3expressed interest in this class until they were confronted by our request for writingpapers, none of which were major research papers, all of which were very topical andlively. The teaching and research assistants knew many of the students. Students droppedwhom the assistants identified from composition courses as very good students. One ortwo students explained that they simply could not commit the time that such a classrequired.We learned vividly that writing is not a way to attract students if one is in pursuitof large enrollments. One Institute of Technology student who remained told me that allhis friends said he was crazy to take a course that required writing. Students seemedparticularly bothered by the length of the assignments. They were less concerned by whatthey were asked to do than the number of pages they were asked to produce. They couldtolerate short papers, despite what was involved, but any assignment that asked them toproduce ten pages was extremely upsetting. Further, students commented repeatedly thatthis was not a composition course: why were they writing? They simply saw no essentialand fundamental connection between writing and learning. Even the students who stayed,knowing precisely what was required, continued to ask why writing was part of the class.The Writing ProcessWe attempted to integrate writing into the class by devoting one of every fourclass sessions to students discussing their drafts in small peer groups. Inlecture/discussions we made some (and then increasing) attempts to draw attention to theway papers and books were written, how arguments were constructed, and particularly inthe area of cultural criticism, how rhetorical strategies were used. We learned when onlyseven of the twenty-eight students who remained in the course attended draft discussions
4Prellthat we had to require drafts by threatening severe penalties. It was then that theexperienced composition teachers informed me that they require students to turn in drafts.Only when students were penalized in this class, and obviously others, did they thenagree to share their drafts.I do not think this non-participation was primarily motivated by last-minute paperwriting. Rather, we learned in this writing-intensive course about the abiding anxiety andshame students feel about their writing and the particular agony of showing their work topeers. In their evaluations they expressed great discomfort with critiquing or askingothers to make comments on their work. The need to create a community of learners ispressing in the College of Liberal Arts. Students are protective and supportive of oneanother, but they have less information about how to work together constructively.Students did express tremendous appreciation for any feedback they received on drafts.They wanted drafts to be required of them, but they found the process of writing andreading, and above all showing their drafts, distressing.In addition to requiring drafts, we met with students twice during the quarter totalk about their writing; we learned that very few of them, despite their compositiontraining, had developed a writing process. Few used outlines or wrote multiple drafts.Many students did write drafts before typing them and then edited in the process oftyping. Most students felt that they would benefit from more frequently writing drafts.Teaching a Subject and Teaching WritingFinally, as the quarter wore on, we found ourselves being more committed togetting students to write what we considered a good paper than to treating the material ascomplexly as we had hoped. In fact, I felt that as a teacher, and with the students in my
Interdisciplinary Writing Through Multidisciplinary Writing5class, I more or less recapitulated the very problem I attempted to address. I found it moreand more difficult to teach or to get them to produce papers about how to integrateabstraction with everyday life. The teaching staff more and more yearned simply to havestudents clearly write about TV or work or family history. We could not seem to succeedin getting them to integrate theoretical questions or concerns about the subject. Forexample, we felt that the assignment that students wrote about work was on the wholesuccessful. Virtually all of these papers showed more vivid writing than otherassignments. All of them seemed to demonstrate some awareness of the complexity of theworkplace. Most were impressed by The Managed Heart, Arlie Hochschild’ s fine bookon the selling of emotions in airline attendants’ work. Most were sensitive to those issuesin their own workplaces. The finest papers were extraordinary—a fictional account of asports box where journalists wrote fifty years ago and a memoir piece about working forone night in a canning factory with Chicana workers by a then-undergraduate about toleave for college.By contrast, a paper requiring students to analyze TV programs around themes ofcontemporary culture, asking them to look at articles about cultural criticism and a fineexample of historical analysis of TV by George Lipsitz as well as an article by HenryLouis Gates about the portrayal of African Americans on TV yielded plot description.Despite conferences, reading drafts, and other forms of feedback, students slavishlydescribed plots and nothing beyond that. Students insisted that they were frustrated, thatthe reading had nothing to do with the paper, and that we could not effectivelycommunicate our goals to them.
6PrellTheir final assignment, a revision of a paper written during the course, focused onwriting alone. We tried to get them to articulate an audience for their paper and then toconsider how to write to those readers. Most students rewrote their work papers. Littleconsideration was paid to how their papers revealed their understanding of work as acultural process or how work articulated with and structured everyday life. Most often, afine paper was a paper built on clear prose. A draft often did show considerable growth inwriting skills for the student, but no other type of intellectual growth. We never felt theseskills were unimportant, but they were some distance from how the course was firstenvisioned.The EvaluationWe were convinced that how students understood writing and how they felt aboutthemselves as writers might provide some insights into what we felt was constantfrustration at integrating writing and analysis and getting students to take writingseriously. To this end, we constructed a lengthy evaluation and self-inventory aboutwriting for students to fill out at the end of the class. Because I was teaching this class forthe first time, there was no question that I made a number of mistakes, that theassignments were not as clear as they would be the next time, and that I required toomuch writing. But holding those matters constant, we all felt that we did learn a greatdeal about students, ideas about writing that we believe affected the success of the class.From the self-inventories, we concluded the following about writing and attitudestoward writing:1. How writing is presented to students and the frequency with which it is requiredare important factors;
Interdisciplinary Writing Through Multidisciplinary Writing72. Student authority is very much involved in the process of self -evaluation aboutwriting; and3. On a continuum of passive to active, students are more inclined toward passiveaids in writing. They have difficulty seeing themselves as central to the writingprocess.Students were asked to rank their confidence in themselves as writers when theybegan and completed the class. Apart from our own doubts about how much studentsactually did improve, students’ self-reporting indicated that sixty percent of the studentsbelieved that they became better writers in this class. Thirty-two percent felt theirconfidence did not change. Only eight percent, or two students, felt less confidence intheir writing. On a scale of five, students, on average, judged themselves as 3.375 andconcluded on average ranking themselves as 3.9. Most students felt some change hadoccurred, with some feeling that the change was substantial.The increase in confidence seems to be directly linked to practice. As one studentwrote, “By sheer volume I got better.” Closely linked to this was feedback from theteaching staff. Students clearly prized positive feedback, but any feedback was desirable.One of the research assistants questioned if mediocre paper writing really can yieldimprovement in writing skills, but the students, at least, felt that it could.We also wondered which type of writing students liked best and least. Thefictional/journal writing was their favorite, followed by the historical writing assignment.Interestingly, the students who liked the history writing tended to like the fictionalwriting the least and vice versa. We learned that some students felt put upon to be“creative” and others to be “factual.” Even those who most liked writing about work felt
8Prellthey learned the most from historical writing; somewhat devaluing other types oflearning, learning that might be more theoretical or critical. Two contrasting commentsmake the point: “I feel the information to write on is more laid out for me and that itdoesn’t require much personal thought. Fiction work seems hardest for me because itrequires me to be more creative.” And the other opinion: “Journal/fiction was the best. Ifind it easier to write when it relates to me personally. I hated the magazine assignment. Itwas more analytical and research oriented.”Students’ voices, their responsibility for knowledge, and their relationship to whatthey should know is highly problematic. They seem centrally concerned with what theycan know and how they can know it. A small minority felt they could not write the waythey liked “easy-going,” “casual,” or other such terms. And it follows in their writingprocess.We discussed process at length outlines, drafts, feedback, etc. Students felt themost important contributions to their writing were first, contact with teaching staff and,second, contact with other students. At the same time, twenty-two of the twenty-fiverespondents said they would use drafts in the future. Most students did want to takepositive action, but those students who responded that they would not use a particularstrategy for their writing process (feedback, outlines, etc.) put the burden for writingdifficulty on others.What we learned upholds long-term studies reported about Harvard students,which were released during the quarter this course was taught. Students want feedback ontheir writing. Frequent writing assignments are immensely helpful. For example, onestudent lamented that she learns about writing only not to have it required for years and
Interdisciplinary Writing Through Multidisciplinary Writing9then she forgets again. Paying attention to the students voices in writing, educating themto be scholars, and helping them assume authority in all kinds of writing seems a veryprofound challenge that came out of this work. I have learned how frightened students areof writing and that they unquestionably want to write better, but that they have little senseof how to go about doing that, despite having taken composition courses. They werestartled that people would care so much about writing outside of composition, and thesplit we wanted very much to overcome in this class was something we came to describemore ably than we were able to heal.For The FutureI have learned from this challenging, exciting, sometimes depressing, andthoroughly interesting project that I will never teach without assigning writing. But I havealso learned that it is better to require a few papers and to incorporate writing in differentways—short in-class papers and journals.To integrate theory and experience, and writing and reasoning, requires a muchless ambitious course than we constructed. I would use far fewer books and articles anduse them far more carefully. Accomplishing less to understand more is the chasteninglesson of this class.I would also urge the use of writing surveys at the beginning of each course of thesort we constructed and have students refer to and think about them throughout thecourse.I learned as well that many students are alienated learners and, with that, alienatedwriters. The “culture” of undergraduate life, based on the experience of this course, doesnot promote student community, does not empower students to take control of their own
10educations, and allows them to dichotomize frequently between “facts” and “personalopinions.” Writing might well help in addressing many of these problems.Prell
Interdisciplinary Writing Through Multidisciplinary WritingAppendixThe appendix includes the course syllabus,
Interdisciplinary Writing Through Multidisciplinary Writing 3 expressed interest in this class until they were confronted by our request for writing . They wanted drafts to be required of them, but they found the process of writing and reading, and above all showing their drafts, distressing. In addition to requiring drafts, we met with .
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