"Rhetorical Agency" and such...

First, I troll myself:

No doubt this post is long overdue, but I'd like to preface my reflection on Cooper's piece by saying that I think it has taken me so long to post because synthesizing and connecting all of the articles we've been reading has been an especially challenging endeavor for me.  Theory, more than any other type of reading, is the most difficult prose for me to process because of the intensive work that goes in to parsing out and appropriating all of the jargon.  In short, I feel very hesitant to share my rough, raw, and extremely underdeveloped thought processes that these pieces evoke.  Nonetheless, here it is.

The whole idea of complexity theory fascinates me.  The fact that Cooper brings in neurology and neurophenomenology seems an especially appropriate move to make when discussing agency.  Of course, due to our extremely limited knowledge of the human brain, it makes sense that we haven't been able to rightly make use of the role neurology plays in the various thought theories we study.  Here are some questions I had right off the bat concerning neurology and complexity theory:

• When is it appropriate or possible to introduce students to complexity theory as a world view?  I wonder this because it seems like students should be introduced to such a way of thinking at as early an age as possible because the world is so vast and composed of so many different systems and subsystems.  It thus seems prudent (to me) to get them questioning these things early on; doing so, I think, would steer them away from or at least discourage the way too prevalent practice of taking concepts and power structures for granted.  I myself wish I would've learned to question and research the world in this way sooner than grad school, but perhaps it biologically isn't possible to do based on the trajectory of typical neurological development?
• Along these lines, I wanted to mention that I thought of our Singer article in 151 at this point, as Cooper says on page 421, "...though the world changes in response to individual action, agents are very often not aware of their intentions, they do not directly cause changes, and the choices they make are not free from influence from their inheritance, past experiences, or their surround."  This made me think of Assange and how people often make the mistake (Singer included) of revering individuals for the changes they instigate instead of studying the complex social interactions and events that prompted that individual's contribution in the first place.  I also thought about Rivers and Weber's "mundane" and "monumental" documents and the symbiotic roles they play in ecological composition.

I could see a lot of connections to genre theory throughout the piece, though Cooper doesn't outright specify these connections.  Her talks about fragmentation and the brevity of agency reminded me of the melange of genres that people (as students, professionals, citizens, etc.) must move and negotiate within in their everyday lives (423).  

I was also particularly interested in the neurodynamic intentional arc on page 429.  Cooper says, "The part of the loop involving intent, action, and the creation of the meaning of sensory input is largely nonconscious, as is the resultant formation of memories and dispositions.  Through these processes, the agent is provided with meaning for free."  While I'm not entirely sure I'm grasping this concept, I'm going to try to explain why I think I have by relating it to a movie I saw this weekend:

• This weekend I saw Cabin in the Woods at the Athena Grand.  I was excited to see the film because a few people whose tastes in movies generally parallel mine said it was an excellent subversion of the typical horror film.  To some extent, it was.  I won't spoil it for anyone, but I will say that it's a recognizably self-aware film.  Its meta-level plot constructions and boundary-blurring blend of humor and seriousness appealed to my desire for the movie to be different, that is, unclear.  However, I got lost somewhere in the middle of the movie and emerged from the theater with a concise (but terribly cursory and superficial) review: it was good, but it could've been better.  This was a total geek moment for me because I had just read the Cooper article before viewing Cabin, so I forced myself to figure out why I was so vehement about it falling short.

This required me to ask myself a few questions: what types of films do I normally like?  What kinds do I normally dislike?  What does a film have to do for me to consider it well made? Poorly made?  Why do I find these things so appealing or unappealing?  I could seriously go on for days and pages about all of this, but in the interest of time I'll cut it down to this: I tend to like noires, westerns, dramas, melodramas, and foreign films.  In terms of "global patterning," one of the things they all have in common are intense and intricately crafted moods that usually involve strategic shots, lighting, angles, makeup, costumes, and music.  All of these elements combined tend to sway my "emotions" to this strange state of limbo where I feel intensely (anything from sadness, happiness, pity, sentimentality) but also am unsure of how I should be feeling.  Based on my past experiences, I know that I like these kinds of movies because (I think) they're open to interpretation, and their meanings shift depending on time, place, and the individual.  So I concluded that perhaps Cabin in the Woods fell short for me because it failed to implement the visual and aural experiences/moods that I value in films -- the experiences/moods that mean the most to me personally.

Sheesh, what I'm trying and failing to do is demonstrate this neurodynamic intentional arc.  See the meme above.

I have more to say about responsible rhetorical agency, but I'll save it for class.  I hope this was at least mildly helpful or interesting to someone out there!

Performance, Identity, and Writing

We have discussed a number of interesting things since the start of the quarter. I am glad that I had the opportunity to discuss the Melanie Kill essay because it made the conversation about rhetorical genre theories a little more interesting. Further, my thesis focuses on performance and identity in relation to storytelling. I am interested in the ways in which people connect through storytelling as well as what storytelling accomplishes for a particular group of people. During Thursday's discussion, I started to think about how my research on storytelling, particularly Performance Poetry/Spoken Word is related to rhetorical genre theory, discourse communities, and literacy.

Of course, my thoughts brought me back to the Lunsford et al piece, "Performance Writing, Performing Literacy". Often, I relate to some of the student's opinions on "out-of-class" writing. When writing for class, I often find myself very conscious about what I am writing and how I am writing it. I'd hate to be misunderstood. On the other hand, I am more of a risk take when it comes to my poetry or blog posts. My art is up for interpretation so it doesn't offend me when someone misunderstands what I've written. (Though after reading Kill and Heilker, I'm becoming more conscious of the "me" that comes out in my writing or how I am "being")  However, some artists, poets especially, are concerned with how people interpret what they've written so they choose to perform their written work. As I've stated, I'm not obsessed with performance, but I do agree with Gere's idea that "performance is a another valuable component of the curriculum" (Lunsford et al, 232). I believe that it helps to transform language, the possibilities of language, and the ways in which students acquire literacy. I don't believe that students have to perform in the classroom, but I do believe it is valuable to have performance be a part of the learning experience.

During an Upward Bound course, I was responsible for helping students think critically about a Malcolm X speech. Students had to read the speech first and provided responses on X's argument. After turning in their responses, many students expressed that they wanted to hear X speak because they felt as if they didn't gain anything from simply reading it. Fortunately, I was able to find the speech online. After listening to his speech in class, I had them write another response. It seemed as if they better understood his argument after listening to it. Unlike their first responses, many of them mentioned his voice, tone, and how they really connected with X. It was in that particular course that I found performance to be valuable. I began to think about student writing and what students may miss if teachers do not include performance in the classroom (speeches, digital/video narratives, etc).

Further, after reading Mark Otuteye's piece on self-performing, I thought about how the student-teacher relationship as well as classroom identity may be affected if self-performed writing is included in the curriculum. Thinking back to Kill's piece, I feel like the effect is evident. Kill talked a lot about self-presentation for both students and teachers. This may be my background in critical pedagogy, but I believe it is important to know your students. I believe that self-performed writing provides an opportunity to get to your students. It allows students another way in which to position themselves when reading and writing new texts. I'd also like to say that by providing  room for self-performed writing can help decrease resistance, however, students' reactions to the digital narrative assignment that Matt assigned in the Upward Bound course would prove differently.

Relating this back to my research on storytelling, I want to see self-performed writing as a way to respond to the texts that students will read in our classrooms. For example, we talked about sexism and sexuality in my First-Year Composition Course. I often struggled with responding to those texts through academic writing, so I think self-performed writing would have helped me to position myself or engage the texts. I would have rather written a poem as my response. I believe a poem would have given me more room to better present myself. Below is an example of how one may respond to discourse on sexuality through self-performed writing. (Of course, it's Searius Add. I'll be interviewing him soon about the power of Performance Poetry.)

To conclude, I am now thinking about self-performed writing as well as the alternative research writing that Davis and Shadle provided in their piece. I believe that exploring identity/self-presentation and  performance in relation to First-Year Composition courses is important. We're able to identity ways to reshape the writing curriculum and our identities as teachers. Additionally, we can continue our conversation on the relationship between Rhetoric & Composition and Communication.

"The Future of Rational-critical Debate in Online Public Spheres"

Professor of English at St. Cloud University (St. Cloud, Minnesota), Matt Barton's research interests include videogame theory and history, digital rhetorics, rhetorics and public culture, and new media. He's published two books on videogame history and co-edited a book on wiki-writing with Bill Cummings. He facilitates a website called Armchair Arcade with Bill Loquidice that explores "the complete history of videogames, computers, gadgets and gizmos" and also hosts "Mattchat": "a weekly Youtube show dedicated to classic videogames for all systems." He's also done some recent scholarship on reward systems in videogames and the opportunities for applying these systems to wiki assessment.

Barton's done some interesting things with wikis in the classroom: including the development of Rhetoric and Composition textbook he collaboratively authors with students. Along with another presenter, Carra Leah Hood, Barton and I presented a panel at CCCC 2012 which dealt with implementation and assessment of wiki writing assignments in the comp. classroom. He's also just published an article in Technical Communication which provides a nuanced assessment model for wiki assignments, one which takes an "archaeological approach" to grading the writing that (should) happen on wikis: discussion and collaboration. So he's someone that I like and his work has very much influenced my interests.

The article I chose for us to discuss, "The Future of Rational-critical Debate in Online Public Spheres," was published in a 2005 issue of Computers and Composition, around the time Barton was finishing up his Ph.D. at South Florida. I imagine he was working on it as a student, under the direction of Joe Moxley (those who were in a previous course with Dr. Rouzie might remember an article I presented on by this guy, who has also done a lot of work with online discourse and new media.). In 2005, Web 2.0 was a relatively new(er) concept, especially in fields Digital Rhetorics/Digital Composition. So it might be useful to remember that Barton's work on these "writing technologies" (discussion boards, blogs, wikis) has been influential. That is, the exigencies and impulses of this article, as they apply to Web 2.0, continue to be reiterated in more recent work.

One thing that really interests me about this article is the "technological utopianism" or technotopia at work in Barton's impulse to promote these writing technologies as capable of producing critical-rational public spheres:

My purpose here is to pay attention to three online technologies that, if strategically embraced by teachers of writing, have the potential to reinforce the principles inherent in a true democracy and thwart the corporate interest. (178)

This kind of rhetoric really allows for a strong realization of exigency, but not the only one we might complicate in our discussion. The corporate interest Barton talks about here is another clear call for action, and Barton uses the work of Jurgen Habermas to create a problem' in current public communication: the debilitating effect of mass media and the (eventual) descent of the Internet from a more open, democratic structure to one which is more strictly controlled and regulated by corporate entities:

Habermas’ story ends on a sad note; the public writing environments that he argued were so essential to the formation of a critical public sphere failed as commercialism and mass media diminished the role of the community and private persons. It is not hard to see that the same diminishment is happening in today’s online communities, yet it is not too late to start paying attention. We can indeed learn from the mistakes of the past—specifically, by considering the rise and fall of the newspaper as a platform for rational critical debate. (179)\

By calling attention to these exigencies (which play into these larger technotopic and technophobic narratives), I do not mean to invalidate Barton's claims. But I do want us to consider how genre and discourse ecology governs what Barton is saying. His "evidence" for the degradation of the Internet makes sense. Here are two quotes from the article that further speak to this situation:

The Internet is losing its democraticizing features and is becoming everyday more like our newspapers and television, controlled from above by powerful multinational corporations, who demand passivity from an audience of total consumers. (177) 

In short, the more complex and expensive the process of creating a professional web site becomes, the fewer people will be able to do so. The workers are being gradually, yet effectively, separated from the means of intellectual production. (178)

What we might ask here, though, is this: Was the Internet ever a pure democratic, "rational-critical" space in which multiple participants could shape and reshape the discourse and resist hegemonic discourses and narratives? We can ask the same question of Habermas' work, in which Barton finds a theoretical framework. As appropriated by Barton, Habermas locates these public spheres in early print media such as the newspaper

At this early incarnation, the newspaper was apolitical; it was just a collection of “pure news,” and the publisher saw it as a purely a matter of business. This changed when newspapers took on “ideologies and viewpoints;” newspapers began publishing editorials, and newspapers became“carriers and leaders of public opinion, and instruments in the arsenal of party politics” (p.182). (180-181)

as well as in bourgeois public spheres of the late 18th century. Did such spheres, in which individuals could “freely” debate, ever actually exist?  British coffee houses “allowed only men and were often visited by powerful and influential nobility” (Barton, 180). But what about media or technologies? Can they ever be purely “apolitical”?

A feminist critique of Habermas would take issue with his idealization of the “bourgeois public sphere of the late eighteenth century” as allowing empowering private critique of political and public authorities as well as his assertion that the “patriarchal conjugal family” empowers a critical private sphere (179). Such narratives obviously silence/omit multiple subjectivities from rational-critical debate, as Barton is careful to acknowledge:

In principle, anyone with reason and the willingness to learn was “able to participate” in these societies (p. 37). Of course, in practice there were many people altogether excluded, yet the idea of universal access and equality was highly influential in bourgeois thinking of this time. (180)

With this acknowledgement, the question should then be turned to Barton's application of Habermas to Internet writing technologies. Even if these technologies do allow for critical-rational debate, Who is silenced in Web 2.0? Who is left out of the discourse? And is the discourse capable of defending itself from corporate entities?

Barton's article ends on an optimistic (and extremely idealistic) note: "Perhaps an upcoming generation finding subjectivity in blogs, developing rational-critical debating skills in online bulletin boards, and building a critical public sphere with the help of wikis will help "remediate culture" and restore true democracy to the public" (180). One final question: Habermas and Barton both employ C.W. Mills’ definitions of “public” and “mass” communications? (181) Can these be applied to academic cultures? Are academic journals and books representative of “public” or “mass” communications? How do you think Barton would respond to the idea that academics do more work in public online spaces?

Post Discussion (Melanie Kill)

Thank you everyone for a really great discussion on Thursday! The discussion really helped me to make connections to our readings for Week 4. Additionally, I feel like the discussion opened us up to the possibilities of discussion genre in the classroom. I'm more of a Literature and Creative Writing person, however, the opportunity to discuss genre in relation to rhetoric and composition has opened me up to studying rhetoric and composition beyond our course.

Having time to reflect on Thursday's discussion, I wish I would have provided examples of prompts that are similar to the example that Kill provides in her article. I think it was valuable to look at the syllabi, so I think the discussion would have been richer had I provided examples myself. I also wish I would have focused more on the quotes that I selected. I think this would have been helpful in understanding Kill article (for those who may not have been comfortable with discussing it).

Additionally, we didn't have the opportunity to really talk about perpetuating power relations. We talked about it a little when discussing the syllabi, but I wanted to really get into how power can affect our relationships with students, especially how our the various genres (syllabi, writing prompt, etc.) can prevent us from building transferable relationships with students. We could have also talked more about transfer value in relation to student writing.

Additionally, I found the discussion (and Kill's article) to compliment our other readings for Thursday. It gave us the opportunity to talk more about our own performance and identity as teachers. Further, facilitating this discussion was different/awkward for me because I am not a first year composition instructor. However, I have learned things from you all that I will think about when preparing to teach in the fall.

I appreciate you all talking the time to listen to my story. I hope that you all found it helpful in understanding performance and identity. Also, I hope you all found my questions helpful in understanding Kill's essay.

-Simone

Davis and Shadle

In our two classes this last week on genre, we didn’t really have a lot of time to discuss Robert Davis and Mark Shadle’s “‘Building a Mystery’: Alternative Research Writing and the Academic Act of Seeking.” So, I thought it might be a good idea to have a conversation here on the blog.

I really liked this article, but I also disliked parts of it at the same time. Since I love the history of composition, I also loved the section when Davis and Shadle discussed the history of the research paper and the way they brought in Connors and Russell. I also extremely interested in the research paper as a genre (both historically and pedagogically), and I liked some of their ideas for “alternative” research writing.

At the same time, however, I wondered a bit at just how “alternative” some of these “alternatives” really are. As I was reading the article, I was writing my conversation with the authors in the margins, and by page 2 I had written, “They need a definition of the ‘modernist research paper.’” But, unless I missed something, they failed to provide a sufficient definition of “modernist research paper.” From what I could gather, though, this modernist research paper is basically the informational research paper, in which students just report and regurgitate information. (Just the kind of research paper that many students do in high school—no argument). But, I asked myself, how common is it in first-year writing courses for teachers to assign a “modernist research paper”? I don’t. I don’t know anyone who does. (Although I’m sure that somebody does). Davis and Shadle argue in favor of teaching the “argumentative research paper,” but isn’t this what many of us already do? Then they argue for the “personal research paper,” which really looks very much like the “exploratory essay” that Dr. Nelson and many of us have taught. (Also like the I-Search, which is fairly common.)

So, if we already are doing some of these forms of the research paper, then are they really “alternatives” for us? (Has something radically changed in first-year writing classes since the article was published in 2000?) Maybe I’m being too hard on Davis and Shadle here. (I’m really just trying to start a conversation). Of course, the “multi-genre/media/disciplinary/cultural research project” really is an alternative form of research writing that I don’t assign. (I’m afraid to assign this one).

Finally, and completely unrelated to the above, I’m interested in what others thought of Davis and Shadle’s idea of “building a mystery.” My own personal response was pretty negative, perhaps because of the way they talked about it. I found some of it a bit romanticized and even sappy. For instance: “Beyond this entwinement of the modern and postmodern, we prefer, however, to see these methods as neither modern nor postmodern, but instead as historical time-travelers, regathering habits of mind and ways of writing, while attempting to stage intellectual experience as seeking and saying in the heart of mystery” (426, my emphasis). I guess I understand why they’re bringing in the idea of mystery, but I couldn’t help laughing every time they talked about it. (Maybe their terminology?).

Feel free to disagree with my possibly unfair treatment of Davis and Shadle. Despite my critiques, I still liked the article.

Works Cited

Davis, Robert, and Mark Shadle. “‘Building a Mystery’: Alternative Research Writing and the Academic Act of Seeking.” College Composition and Communication 51.3 (2000): 417-46. Print.

Teaching a Multi-Genre Paper in Freshman Comp

As a big proponent of the multi-genre assignment in FWCs, I thought I'd talk about the positive experiences I've had with these papers and the primary benefits I found they brought to the classroom.

The Assignment:

The first paper students in my ENG 101 class wrote was a Multi-Genre Personal Narrative. My experience was shaped by teaching this assignment at WVU, where the writing program has both a Freshman and a Sophomore component and so the FWC has more room for personal writing. I don't necessarily believe the personal narrative elements of this assignment would be appropriate for the ENG 151 classroom. However, I believe the multi-genre elements could easily be incorporated in any of the three major papers we already teach in a variety of ways. And so I will focus on those. Key elements to the assignment were:

• A requirement that the paper contain at least five different elements and a holistic approach to positioning those elements as each illuminating one or more aspects of the general topic of the paper. It was important that students understood they were not developing five different papers and then stapling them together, but that they were exploring in depth a single question in multiple ways.
• A great variety of available genres listed on the assignment prompt and an openess to including genres not anticipated by it. (My assignment prompt, which varied only slightly from the standard prompt, had over seventy possible genres listed in three categories.)
• Categorization of the genres to ensure that at least two of the five included pieces contained significant text elements and that three included researched elements.
• Clearly stated expectations for the amount of writing required in each genre category, so that students understood that while they could choose some genres which did not require significant writing--say, an editorial cartoon--the final paper still needed to have a word count of at least 2000 and that they should consider this when planning their paper.
• A grading rubric (which students helped to design) that emphasized key learning goals applied across the work as a whole, and which each component was expected to address.

The First Good Thing

The first good thing to come out of starting the FWC with a multi-genre assignment was that the discussions of genre gave us a common language for analyzing and creating texts that we would use for the rest of the class. As Ashley pointed out in class, students do already have a working understanding of genre--particularly in music and film--when they come into the classroom. What they don't have is a shared set of key terms. By focusing on genre in the initial assignment, students had the opportunity to use this language first in familiar settings by applying it to genres with which they were already familiar and then to the academic genres which were part of the coursework leading up to the drafting of the paper.

The Second Good Thing

Everybody is really good at something, and really excited about being good at it. By opening up the possibilities to multi-modal writing early on, it's possible to move students toward thinking about writing divorced from the concept of "writing a paper." They were, instead, writing songs, poems, advertisements, reviews, etc. Things they were interested in writing outside the classroom discourse. This generated work that could be praised, and a key element in my teaching philosophy is that it's important to find (genuinely) praiseworthy things in the work students produce. In her paper "Multigenre-Multigendered Research Papers," Mary Styslinger asserts that "(t)he multigenre research paper allows students equal access to voice(s), and its flexible structure permits them to utilize those genres most comfortable and suitable for representing independent ideas" (54). It was my experience that while it was often easy to tell which genres students were most engaged with in any one paper, every paper showed serious engagement with at least one--and usually many--genres in a way that I don't think we find as often in early FWC papers.

The Third Good Thing

Asking students to shape their work to the expectations of a variety of genre conventions requires critical engagement not only of the writer, but also of peer reviewers. The peer review process itself becomes, in part, an exercise in genre analysis. These skills are critical to later assignments, such as rhetorical critique.

The Fourth Good Thing

It's fun. It brings play back into the process. Students create works which other students are able to identify as interesting (and, let's face it, peer reviewing even a really good strong summary/response papers is unlikely to produce the same enthusiasm for the work of another student), and of which the author is often genuinely proud. In my experience, producing early work that had value to peers allowed students the confidence to take greater risks in later assignments.

Some Dangers

Of course, with any assignment, there are dangers that have to be avoided. In order to get students to understand that this is both playful and serious work, it's important to craft the prompt in such a way that the evaluative part of the process is as transparent as possible. Clear expectations are particularly important because it's not unheard of for students to try to cherry pick "easy" genres. Because of this, it's also key that instructors become involved in the writing process of each individual early on so as to intervene if there aren't enough genres with depth to adequately meet learning goals. Finally, it's an assignment in which the instructor must be able to allow for some risks that don't pan out: the rap that ends up more silly than insightful, for instance, or the Lady Gaga/Gloria Steinem mash-up that seemed better as an idea than it is as a realized product.

And so...

I haven't included a multi-genre assignment in my ENG 151 classes, although I am considering doing so next year. It's an easier paper to fit into a four or five paper, semester long course than into the three paper, quarter long course. I'm interested to know if any of you who are teaching comp classes include a mutli-genre paper, and if so, how you've fit it in.

Work Cited:

Styslinger, Mary E. "Multigenre-Multigendered Research Papers." The English Journal 95.4 (2006): 53-57, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 19 April 2012.

Building Connectedness through the Course Syllabus

“We seem to assume that our colleagues and our students will intuitively be able to reconstruct the creature we see in our mind’s eye from the few bones we give them in the syllabus” – Sharon Rubin

I have always felt proud for having a succinct and nicely formatted syllabus – clean lines, white space, and consistency throughout, one that never runs over 4 pages. Honestly, I never questioned the content of my syllabus until I taught FYW at a community college using the textbook Composing Knowledge, edited by Rolf Norgaard. 

After a few years, it was obvious that students connected with certain readings, one of them being “Professors, Students, and the Syllabus,” by Sharon Rubin, which was originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Rubin was motivated to write about the problematic ambiguity of course syllabi after reviewing them in batches during her work as an assistant dean at the University of Maryland. Even though this article was published nearly 30 years ago, students still feel confused when they review their course syllabi. Our discussion on Thursday provided some insight into some ways we can remedy potential miscommunication, and I’d like to continue that discussion because my syllabus falls into both of Rubin’s dreaded categories: I am both a “lister” and a “scolder.” Before another semester begins, I want to revise my syllabi to better reflect my hopes and goals for the course, my personality, my pedagogy, and, simply put, my reason for doing the things I do with/in the course. Even though I felt moved to revise my syllabi after reading this article in the past, admittedly, I have never done so. So why revise now?

First, revising our course syllabi for our introductory TA courses is smart practice for when we are able to propose and design our own original courses, something I’ve been fortunate enough to experience. Working outside of department requirements calls for savvy choices, an understanding of how course material interacts with curriculum expectations and course objectives, and a clear justification for the course and its texts, especially when they might be seen as precarious by administration and/or students (in my case, GLBTQ humanities and GLBTQ literature courses in a very conservative mid-Michigan). It is also standard protocol for hiring committees to request sample syllabi along with explanations of course choices, organization, and so on.

Second, there are good tools out there to help us do so. Some of Rubin's noteworthy suggestions:

1. Explain the course’s organization. How do you see one reading/essay lead into the next?
2. Let students know what types of learning will be expected of them: surface versus deep learning, group work, presentations, level/amount of discussions, etc.
3. How will students with different learning styles be accommodated?
4. Explain the purpose of the assignments, outside of the assignment sheet. This could be valuable as students struggle to decode assignment sheets and essay prompts – another tricky genre where miscommunication rears its ugly head.
5. Furthermore, beyond the point value of the assignment, what will be demanded of the student? Which specific course objectives does the assignment target? 

We already know that pronouns, verb tense, sentence arrangement, narrative approach, and cartoons/images can be ways to construct the classroom through the syllabus. Here are some of my own suggestions:

1. Let students know that you are open to suggestions and feedback throughout the course.
2. Include your teaching philosophy, so the students gain insight into your approach and pedagogy through a professional lens (another genre to analyze, too!)
3. Explain your feedback philosophy for commenting (suggested by one of the students Nancy Sommers interviewed in her amazing video Beyond the Red Ink).
4. Have your current class revise the course syllabus near the end of the quarter in small groups; has the syllabus adequately captured the workload, classroom environment, course policies, and assignments?
5. Create a multi-modal version of your syllabus using a newsletter format (a “regular” version could also be available for those who aren’t “hectic Zen enough”). Why not include a snapshot of an average day in your classroom? You could even have students work together to create/imagine this document using classroom technology as a participation exercise.
6. Let your students know how you define what a good teacher is rather than just focusing on what makes a good student. I preface my syllabus with the following quote: “the central qualities that make for successful teaching can be simply stated: command of the material to be taught, a contagious enthusiasm for the play of ideas, optimism about human potential, the involvement of one’s students, and – not least – sensitivity, integrity, and warmth as a human being. When this combination is present in the classroom, the impact of a teacher can be powerful and enduring.”

Rubin reports that a University of Maryland survey showed, “there was a real desire on the part of both students and teacher for connectedness, but neither group realized that the other shared that desire. If the participants on both sides don’t understand how to develop their relationship, learning will be diminished.” A better understanding of the power of the syllabus will better prepare us as teachers and learners, match our rhetorical approaches with our audience, help us organize our courses and reflect on those choices, and build bridges that impact deep, lasting learning.

Happy Revising!