In an OWC, reading is an inherent part of the experience

What do your students read in their writing courses, especially their first-year courses? And why are they reading those things?

As a teacher, I always assign a lot of readings in my courses. In fact, my process of designing a course usually starts with the readings; then I construct the assignments and then move on to the rest of the course.

For a variety of reasons, I’ve started wondering about this approach of using lists of prescribed readings in my courses. Particularly in an online writing course (OWC), is this really what I need to do?

This year, at Drexel we hired Irvin Peckham to direct our First-Year Writing Program. Irvin has brought some different approaches to teaching writing. He's focused on student attitudes toward writing, for one thing, and he also has a scaled-down approach to syllabi, which includes sparer required writings in these first-year courses. I’m oversimplifying his thoughts about this – check out his blog Personal Writing in the Classroom -- but he has led me to consider that in a well-run writing course, students’ earnest reading of each others' texts is plenty of great reading work for the term.

Yep. And this is particularly so in an OWC. When I looked closely at things this way, it struck me that students were doing a considerable amount of reading in my OWC courses. I’ve focused on the amounts of writing they are doing, but because so much of that writing is open to all course participants, they also read a great deal. My colleague Beth Hewett makes this argument in her new book Reading to Learn and Writing to Teach: Literacy Strategies for Online Writing Instruction. She points out that good OWI practices include a strong course culture of reading and re-reading.

Research has backed up that the reading in OWCs is quite different compared to onsite first-year writing courses; June Griffin and Deborah Minter compared the reading in fully online vs. onsite writing courses and found that the reading load online was more than 2.75 times greater. (1)

Let’s not get into the “do they read it all?” question right now, because the assumption that students ever experience everything in any class modality is flawed. (As I always say, in my many experiences observing onsite classes, I’m struck by students who aren't paying a lick of attention even though there’s some stranger in a tie sitting directly behind them.) My point here is that the literacy experience in an OWC is intense and rigorous by its very nature. Students in the course will engage in a lot of engaged reading on discussion boards and through peer reviews, reading that often turns directly into writing. They are casting their eyes over many, many words in powerfully engaged and often transactional ways.

Of course, there’s still room for those texts that I like to assign, but in an OWC, you don’t have to overburden them (or yourself) with structured reading. Really, I should have known. Writing courses are different from other courses because their syllabi emerge through the organic development of the students’ writing within them. Online, this is even more so.

Note:

1) Griffin, June & Deborah Minter. (2013). The rise of the online writing classroom. College Composition and Communication 65(1), 140-61.

Tales of OWI

I just returned from this year's Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) (in Vegas). My friend and colleague Beth Hewett and I are co-chairs of the CCCC Committee for Best Practices in Online Writing Instruction (a group that will likely be re-named to replace the word "Best" with "Effective").
It was a busy CCCCs for our committee.

First and foremost, the practices and effective principles document that this group has developed, six years in the making, was approved by the CCCC Executive Committee. This is big news we hope not only for us but for the world of writing instruction, and the document will be on the National Council of Teachers of English site very soon. Our committee conducted a panel introducing and discussing the principles, a special interest group meeting (a SIG, in CCCCs parlance) to discuss ways of using the principles, and an open session to talk about technologies to help build conversation around them. We also had a three-hour committee meeting.

Throughout these events, we had lots of conversations with people who teach writing online. As the week went on, I was struck by not only how varied the stories are out there about people's OWI experiences but how eager they are to relate those narratives. People want to share these stories.

I guess this will not come as a surprise to anyone who teaches anything anywhere, but the differences in teaching environments and situations for online writing teachers are staggering. Of course, we have distinct pedagogies, philosophies,and strategies. Of course our institutions are different, as are our students. But I listened to people, I was struck by the vast diversity of reasons behind why they teach online and how varied their institutional and professional experiences are. And then I thought about how illuminating it might be if we could somehow capture their answers to questions like these:

• Why is your program/unit/school offering online writing courses?
• Why do you teach writing online? What got you started?
• What do you like about teaching writing online? What don't you like?
• What kind of support do you have: Technologically? Pedagogically? Administratively? Philosophically?
• What kinds of technology do you use in your courses?
• How well are you paid?
• Can you characterize the kind of students who mostly take your online courses?
• What is your teaching reality like? How are your courses assessed? Where is your office?
• Who develops your course materials?

Our principles are designed to help teachers, administrators, and institutions to address these questions. But what could we do with these stories? There are narratives out there, but most teachers and administrators aren't lucky enough to get to go to CCCCs to hear them. Like many writing teachers, they work diligently but in an often sealed world, having parallel experiences to what others are doing -- but not realizing it.

I'm going to close on an enigmatic note, because my thoughts aren't fully formed, but I'm wondering if there's a grand project here, one that tries to capture some of these narratives and share them. Stay tuned.