Curious about grammar instruction: common ground?

I have a strong response to McGee and Erickson’s essay on politics and MS Word and want to post something that makes a proposal and asks questions. The field of composition seems very rational and democratic in discussions of writing, but I observe a lot of conflict, political division, and polarization around the teaching of grammar. Although there is support in the field of stylistics for teaching grammar in context, as descriptive, and as part of that larger discussion of style, it seems that the majority of the field of composition wants to ignore grammar altogether as not contributing to better writing. However, my experience points to postsecondary teachers who teach grammar regularly and unsystematically (is it because of this lack of conversation within the field and the politicization of the topic?) and students who struggle with grammar, often avoiding content to deal with grammar issues. If the grammar checkers are students’ only coherent source for grammar instruction while writing, students use it. So McGee and Erickson offer good advice that teachers familiarize themselves with grammar checkers and talk about considering the settings of MS Word software. My question is–aren’t we missing the point? In a paper I wrote, I found support for finding an approach to teaching grammar that is descriptive, not prescriptive. If grammar engages student writing at the time when he or she is engaged in writing a paper, my experience in a tutoring center shows that students are interested.  My research shows that process, content, and sentence logic may not be all that far apart, and I’m curious what ideas, feedback, experiences-pro and con-others might have regarding grammar instruction or lack thereof.

Encourage critical thinking and problem solving

What will encourage, motivate and stimulate students to become critical thinkers and problem solvers? Richard Miller’s “This Is How We Dream, Part 2,” architectural design includes “the best of humanities and the best of sciences” in one sustainable building. Miller suggests we post idea-driven documents that belong to no one on the web to show the best of what we are in the academy. We may be at a time in our collective history in which teaching courses across disciplines will best meet our students’ needs. For example, computer science programming classes, art digital media, physics, mathematics, philosophy—compositionists could choose a discipline to collaborate with based on interest or friendship with colleague(s) to bring what an instructor knows about the conversation in his or her discipline to the table for a course that incorporates a collaborative, across-discipline process. I, for one, would not want to sacrifice the connections between learning strategies and writing (Emig, CROSS-TALK, pp. 7-15). However, I repeatedly see pleasure at work in discussions of how we began and continue to incorporate computers into our lives. bell hooks writes in the last paragraph of TEACHING TO TRANSGRESS: “The classroom with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In the field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand…an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom” (p. 207).  If we, as composition teachers, do not want to step outside the border of our discipline, we still have options for interconnectivity within our community of scholars.

My argument is that visual literacy creates concepts in much the same way as writing. Sirc’s essay in WRITING NEW MEDIA argues for the use of Duchamp and Joseph Cornell’s boxes as models of “sustained inquiry” to scaffold through class members’ individual contributions to an interactive project (p. 140). Other examples of art that demonstrate concepts include: Rauschenberg and performance art. Wysocki argues for establishing a relationship to design that helps student to re-vision our relationship to it (WRITING NEW MEDIA, p. 173). Kristie S. Fleckinstein calls it “polymorphic literacy,” reading and writing that draw on verbal and nonverbal ways of shaping meaning (p. 613). I argue that both composition and visual, digital literacy instructors apply rigorous assessment and unwavering values about what it means to communicate conceptually through writing, images, and design: Look for opportunities to respond to the digital literacy infants now learn as they also begin to walk, talk, and engage cardboard picture books.

Reflection on democracy, free-mix culture, and Luddites

Using trial and error with an informal mix of ‘teachers’ and ‘learners,’ video gamers are participating in democratic learning that involves play and collaboration (Buckingham, David, “Introducing Identity,” Youth, Identity and Digital Media, Ed. David Buckingham, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008, p, 16). However, Buckingham urges us to celebrate their success cautiously because “we need to be able to evaluate information if we are to turn it into meaningful knowledge” (p. 17). That is the natural intersection teachers and schools inhabit—but teachers first need awareness of digital literacy and then to find creative ways (as many are already doing) to incorporate that into lesson plans accessible to students. As an example of “cautious celebration,” I cite a Feb. 15, 2011 Contra Costa Times article entitled “Ripple effect in Middle East” by Brian Murphy about protests in Tehran, Bahrain, and Yemen that are “absorbing” the message from Cairo. The Internet and youths changed how future presidential candidates will conduct their campaigns in the United States; in the 2008 election, young people were reported to have voted in unprecedented numbers. As I heard an NPR announcer question an Egyptian spokes person over the weekend, does installing the military in power in Egypt assure democracy? It seems that the questions for education indicate more urgently that our questions about democracy cross borders between nations and languages and have potential for creating democracy in ways beyond what we may have imagined. Encouraging students to evaluate information–to turn all the talk into meaningful knowledge to add to what we already know–is increasingly important.

But to digress a bit to consider “Becoming Literate in the Information Age” by Hawisher, Selfe, Moraski, and Pearson—in 1977-80, performance art became my art medium of choice which meant heavy video equipment, ½ inch video tape. My friend and I video taped one another talking daily for about a month and then watched what we said the next day—it was interesting to see how sometimes what I said was different than what I had been thinking and to get such immediate feedback. We used complicated video editing and expensive color copiers to make images of our 35mm slides. One of my major worries during those days was stealing someone else’s ideas—a somewhat novel idea to me today given the definition of free-mix culture. In the 1990′s at SFSU, an awakening for me were the poems of Marianne Moore, a popular icon, elder poet in the late 1960′s-70′s. She filed articles and images and was a master at borrowing phrases and images—sometimes attributing them, sometimes not. Finally, I looked up Luddite on Wikipedia and found that Ned Ludd in about 1811 objected to the introduction of a machine loom because it meant skilled artisans would lose their jobs. So, I think a worthy question to ask ourselves is what will we lose as we take on digital literacy that we either want to maintain or incorporate into digital literacy?