IWAC 2014: Where did the currents take me?

I just returned from the 2014 IWAC (International Writing Across the Curriculum) Conference at the University of Minnesota, and I have to say it was one of my best conference experiences yet. The presentations were engaging, the people were open and friendly, and Minneapolis was a great city.

During my brief two days there, I managed to sit in on 5 panels, one in which I presented, a keynote, and an incredible plenary session. In truth, it made me a little sad that I'm not a WAC WPA because I would have loved the opportunity to implement some of the ideas that were discussed at the universities where I am involved in writing pedagogy.

The Panels

Here is a brief overview of the titles of the panels that I attended:

• Role Reversal: When Students Teach Faculty in WAC Programs - Deanna Daniels & Brandy Grabow, Kate Ronald & Lucy Manley, and Greg Skutches
• Writing Beyond the Curriculum - Nicole Papaioannou, Dan Reis & Caroline Klidonas, and KaaVonia Hinton & Yonghee Suh
• Interrogating Disciplinarity in WAC/WID: An Institutional Ethnography - Anne Ruggles Gere, Naomi Silver, & Melody Pugh
• Teaching Meaningful Writing: What Faculty Say About Writing Assignments in Their Disciplines - Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, & Neal Lerner
• Multimodal Literacy: Writing, Reading, & Transfer - Andrea Glover, Maggie Christensen, and G. Travis Adams

I will take some time to address the larger issues in each of these panels in separate posts, but I wanted to recap some of the big questions that I've started to ask as a result of these panels and some of the discussion that followed. I picked one large question that was sparked by each.

• Does the campus culture empower students?
• How can on-campus organizations make use of student writers and also enhance student writing?
• How do we frame disciplines? Should we moving toward a theory of centers rather than a theory of boundaries?
• What makes a writing assignment meaningful?
• Should we shift to a WRAC model (writing and reading across the curriculum)?

These questions may be brief in text, but responses are complex, and the ways in which those responses shape student learning experiences and faculty development are important.

The Plenary

The plenary session focused on creating sustainable WAC programs and was led by an A-team of scholars-- Chris Anson, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Chris Thaiss, Linda Adler-Kassner, and Bob McMaster-- who role-played how they would deal with a failing, under-resourced WAC program (a very cool divergence from the traditional plenary talk). Anson would propose scenarios, building the complexities facing the school bit by bit, and the 5 others would respond on the fly. They did not know what they would be asked beforehand.

 As some who hopes to be a WPA one day, I was really intrigued by how the scholars embodied the different thought processes, concerns, and strengths of each individual involved in a WAC initiative, ranging from department chairs to WAC directors to provosts to students. I thought, aside from having a bit of fun, they were incredibly in-tune with those that they served and incredibly empathetic. It helped me see what I might come up against should I someday be invited to try to enhance or save a WAC program.

The speakers reminded the audience that sustainability went beyond a current context and a current moment and planned for the future. The solution also had to be built within the framework of the local context with input from all stakeholders (as much as possible, that is). Top-down initiatives would feel imposing and oppressive and often fail to effectively use the strengths of the parties involved. Collaboration, where possible, is a wonderful thing.

The most important things I took away were:

1. Understand the campus climate and be prepared to work within it, even if the aim is to change it. No model is one-size-fits-all when it comes to campus writing initiatives.
2. Be sensitive to people's fears and frustrations. See challenges as moments for reflection, negotiation, or collaborative education.
3. Bring joy into the work. Focus on the pleasures of learning from one another and the pleasure of writing.

What seems evident from these talks and discussions is that the people here really care about their students and their colleagues. While many people were doing serious research, it was easy to see how much of it could be put into practice and was largely aimed at contributing to a positive learning environment for everyone involved. IWAC really made me excited about the work I'm doing, the field that I intend to contribute to, and continued interactions with the people who I am privileged to call my colleagues. I'm looking forward to (fingers crossed) attending again in 2016.

I would love to hear from IWAC-attendees about their experiences at the conference and from those interested in campus writing initiatives what to make of some of these big questions and themes.

Snark/asm and Second (3rd, 4th,...) Language Learning

For the past few months, I've been trying to learn Portuguese. It is definitely one of the hardest things I have done in a long time. I use interactive websites. I write in elementary grammar books. I listen to podcasts. I even try reading the news and books in Portuguese. Acquiring even the most basic conversational skill has been a painfully slow process. Despite keeping at it everyday, I can make only a few full sentences-- nothing in past tense or conditional or the million other tenses Portuguese has. As someone who is almost a doctor in the English language, it feels so odd to me not to be able to craft complex sentences or find the right vocabulary for the ideas I want to express. I haven't given up yet, though.

The reason I continue to fight it out is partially because I want to be able to converse with my boyfriend's friends and family, but even more so because I've had positive encouragement. My significant other will let me ask him one million questions about the language. He'll sit there and help me try to pronounce words. If I message him in Portuguese, he'll answer me back and show me the correct way to say what I was trying to say. He does this all with patience and kindness, and he reminds me how far I've come. At a birthday party, his family friends made me feel proud of how much I was catching on. One of my best friends is also learning Portuguese, though she is much more advanced than I am, and she also consistently reminds me that I've learned a lot and celebrates my small victories. Even online, when I chat on Babbel.com with native speakers, they never put down my poor grammar or the length of time it takes me to construct a thought. They are all supportive. This has made it easy to learn.

I contrast this with my attempts to learn Greek as an adult. My father is a Greek immigrant and several of my family members and close family friends speak Greek. I've been to Greece twice. I thought it was important to learn the language. The problem is that whenever I tried to speak Greek, I was met with sarcasm or playful mocking. The first time I went to Greece, my cousin would poke fun at me every time I spoke, whether my accent was incorrect or not, simply because I was an American struggling to speak the language. The second time I went to Greece, my grandmother was the only one who encouraged others to speak Greek to me in an attempt to help me learn the language, but she didn't help much with the spoken aspects. At home, my dad made no effort to encourage my Greek learning, even after I dished out a large fee for Rosetta Stone. After a while, I just didn't want to try anymore. No one would engage me. The learning process felt solitary. There was no one to practice with, and as I already felt self-conscious, the playful jests made me not want to try, even when there was.  

Sass doesn't belong in feedback to student writing. 

I spent the first five years of my life in Brooklyn, NY, grew up in Jersey, relocated to Queens, and then returned to Jersey again. I was raised by a native Staten Islander and a Greek transplanted in Brooklyn. Needless to say, I am fluent in sarcasm and teasing. I admit that I will often tease my students when they ask seemingly obvious questions, but now more than ever, I see that there is a time and place for it, and I am trying to train myself to act accordingly.

Learning a new language outside a formal educational settings has really helped me empathize with the plight of students who are learning English or even just learning to craft better Standard American Written English/Academic English/whatever fancy term you want to use to describe the English of the socioeconomic elite. It's become obvious to me that if we want students to learn, we have to tone down the sarcasm and the playful mocking.

The worst case I ever saw was on a student's paper from a law professor. A student was proposing a thesis statement for a research paper, and the professor had written things like "REALLY?????????!?!?????? Are you even trying? Can you think? Oh, so X, Y, Z happened? Really?" in a paragraph long email of harsh sarcasm that addressed his vague, overly general thesis statement. While I guessed that this professor was just offering a bit of tough love, her comments made the student feel incapable of performing the assigned task. They completely alienated him and made him feel far beneath the average student. He didn't want to ask her questions. He didn't feel playfully challenged. He felt defeated and didn't want to write anymore.

I also saw a professor who demanded that his student attend the writing center because he had a slew of grammar issues, which the professor guessed were a result of learning English as a second language. The professor thought he was being encouraging by writing snarky comments, then sending the student for extra help instead of failing him. However, the student's native language was English, and the professor's list of things to work on (which, again, he thought was encouraging) only served to make this student feel stupid and incapable of correcting what were really just small surface-level grammatical errors. He could have learned so much more if the professor just took the time to explain and perhaps actually let him play around with language.

Like I said, language learners definitely need play and playfulness. We need to make learning fun and encourage mistake-making in a nurturing environment. It clearly needs to be interactive. But fun doesn't have to be at the expense of our students, a reminder that we are superior to this, which is what snark and sarcasm both do. These students already know we have mastered something that they are struggling with. Sarcasm should be reserved for those who have already established skill and confidence, who know that they can do better. Those who are already questioning their abilities will only find further doubt in those seemingly harmless teasing remarks. In the process of building confidence, play has to be about discovery and socialization, making new connections.

Boa sorte!

Little Kids and Language Learning

Even though I spent my early years in a bilingual household-- my grandparents, aunt, father and their friends all spoke Greek and English-- I lost my connection to the Greek language when we moved from the duplex my family shared with my grandparents to our own single-family home in New Jersey just before my 5th birthday. While I may still know a few words here and there, I am by no means fluent. I don't know what it's like to know two languages, let alone use them interchangeably.

Which is why I'm fascinated by my boyfriend's 3-year-old sister (aside from being one of the coolest little kids I know). My boyfriend and his family are Brazilian-- not of Brazilian descent, but actually from Brazil. His sister, though, was born and raised in America. Dear BF is completely fluent in English (even more so than some English-speaking people I know I'd say), and his mother speaks enough to get by, though she is more comfortable with and prefers to speak in Portuguese. His little sister can easily switch between English and Portuguese. 

What amazes me about the little peanut is that she knows when to use which language. She can say something in Portuguese to her mom, and then turn her head and speak to me in English. She'll speak in whichever she feels like to my BF, sometimes jumping between languages from sentence to sentence. Clearly, she is able not just to speak both languages, but to think in both, as well. Dear BF can do this too, and I think he's awesome. His ability to switch spoken and thought languages instantly absolutely amazes me. On the other hand, I somewhat expect an adult to know in what context a particular language is appropriate. Most adults can identify others as able to speak to English or another language. However, I thought that would be beyond the comprehension of a 3 year old.

It leaves me with many questions for those who grew up multilingual or have taught their children to be multilingual: 

• How do you learn two languages at once?

• At what point do you start to think in another language?

• How do you learn to differentiate between multiple languages as you learn them, knowing that you've learned a word in one language versus another?

I'm interested in learning other languages, and I'm wondering what I can learn from little kids about acquiring new vocabularies and their cultural contexts. I bet it would also be useful to building better ways to help first-year writers, who often struggle to acquire disciplinary vocabulary and "general writing skills"/academic language simultaneously.