How I Teach Academic Writing, Part I: Pausing and Articulating Your Teaching

I am planning my spring classes now, so I'm thinking about my teaching, which means it's probably a good time to do something I've been thinking about, and begin a series of blog posts about how I approach academic writing. This post, however, is less about anything in particular that I do, and more about how I ended up doing what I do in the classroom.

I was trained to teach first-year writing (though then we called it "freshman English," which seemed so weird as an official term) at the University of Connecticut, but both my graduate degrees are in literature, for better or for worse. I've taken exactly one class on the teaching of writing, and it was taught by someone with a Ph.D. in literature as well. I'd be scared to look back at my early classes and see what they were like. I don't know that I had any kind of coherent theory or idea of academic writing, even if I thought I did. I suspect a lot of my early assignments probably boiled down to "here's a jumble of texts and some questions I thought of; see if you can make something of it all."

I definitely did not have any sense of what it meant to do academic writing, and thus I didn't have the ability to communicate it.

Over time, though, something slowly evolved. I'm sure some teachers spring fully formed out of the gate, but I'm very much a figure-out-as-I-go kind of person. I take a stab at it, then refine, try again, then refine, and over time I accrued a way of doing things that I am pretty proud of.

There are a couple key things that brought this about. One is that for five semesters, I served as one of the Assistant Directors of First-Year Writing. Instead of teaching, my assistantship was to help co-ordinate this gigantic academic writing program, which ran something like 100 sections per semester. I did a lot of different tasks, but most relevantly, the ADs did two things: 1) we ran the orientation for new TAs, and 2) we collected assignments from every instructor.

As any teacher knows, nothing forces you to figure out what you do like telling other people how to do it. I always finished orientation week energized and excited to teach... and then went back to my office job.

But chasing down assignments turned out to be really helpful, too; without even trying, I saw hundreds of different assignments, and started to get a feel for what made sense to me and what did not. Part of the problem of teaching is that it's hard to experiment in variations; you might decide to change how you do something, but then you're largely stuck with it for fourteen weeks. Then next semester, you can tweak again, and so on. Variations can only accrue incrementally. Plus: it's hard to learn any genre by just writing it, and one of the trickiest aspects of teaching is that you rarely see others teach, and even if you do, it's just one other person or so, like a mentor.

But when I finally went back to the classroom, I had read so many different assignments, I had a feel for the genre I just hadn't gotten by writing them. I tossed out my assignments and rewrote them from the top down.

Another thing that helped a lot was working alongside Professor Scott Campbell, who was the faculty Director of First-Year Writing for three of my semesters in office. Scott and I did not always agree, but I had a lot of respect for his thoughtfulness, and some of his ideas have become foundational to my teaching of writing. One of the things I always try to remember is that academic writing is a genuinely exciting medium. There is no other form of writing that quite allows for this kind of detailed, thoughtful approach to a topic, and that can be exciting to read and to write if done well.

There were two final steps in my time at UConn that turned out to be really useful. Around the time I went back to the first-year writing classroom, I went on the job market and had to write a teaching philosophy. A friend of mine (also an English professor) posted this on facebook a couple months ago:

Can we throttle back the relentless positivity of academic social media? Students are not always fantastic, conferences are not always generative, keynotes are not always quotable, interventions are not always so true, and nobody is *that* excited about writing a teaching statement. Our profession has its joys and pleasures, but I feel like the job market increasingly compels us to post as if we feel that every professional experience is equally superlative. (emphasis mine)

I commented, "Wait, people claim to be excited about writing teaching statements?"... but then soon realized that I kind of was. I wouldn't say that I was excited per se, but I actually did find it useful. I had to sit down and articulate what I thought about teaching writing, why it was important, and how I did it. It was something I'd never had to consciously do before, and in doing it, I reached a better understanding of my own teaching.

Most academics I talk to hate writing teaching philosophies, and fair enough, it did kind of suck. But that doesn't mean it can't be valuable. Many writing instructors make their students write reflections on their writing with the claim that this will help them become better writers-- it seems hypocritical to then turn around and claim there's no value in doing written reflection on one's own teaching. (Of course, faculty do hypocritical things like this all time, such as complaining about students on laptops and then using their laptops during meetings.) When I finished, I felt something had crystallized, and I took that understanding back into the classroom and made it even better.

One last key experience: During my second year on the market, I got to a second-round video interview for a term position teaching academic writing. One of the classes I would have taught was a "basic writing" class, for students who struggled. During the interview, they asked how I would teach it, and I had a (decent) answer prepared, based on talking to others at UConn who had taught our basic writing course... which I had never taught myself. But then one of the interviewers asked, "That sounds challenging. Do you think those students would be ready for it?" I could only claim that I thought they would be, but had no practical experience to back it up. So for the next year, I asked for a section of UConn's ENGL 1004 ("Introduction to Academic Writing").

Once again, being forced to articulate how something works is actually quite helpful. The model of academic writing at UConn was to do the same kind of assignment four times. But 1004 ends with that kind of paper. So I had to make a set of assignments that lead up to that kind of paper, breaking down what had been a unified whole into parts. I also had to explain academic writing to a mix of nonnative speakers and low-performing domestic students, so I had to be much better at explaining!

And then I came to University of Tampa (where I talked about 1004 during my interview, so I made the right call there!), which has a similar model to UConn, but not the same, and so my teaching has evolved again.

I didn't set out to teach college writing. I think few people who do actually did. But I've been doing it for over eleven years now, and trying to do so as thoughtfully and deliberately as I can. But it's hard to deliberate in the moment of banging out a syllabus the week before classes, so having opportunities that have forced me to be thoughtful have been key to my growth as a teacher.

Anyway, that was all kind of vague; in future posts I'll get into concrete specifics that build on what I've said here.