Writing Together book coming out soon

The new book that I co-authored with former Drexel student Diana Gasiewski is coming out soon. Writing Together: Ten Weeks Teaching and Studenting in an Online Writing Course will -- fingers crossed! -- be ready by CCCC in Kansas City.

Diana and I are excited -- to say the least -- about the book. It's a narrative of a teacher and student's experience in a first-year OWC. It's written somewhat as a "call and response": I describe in great detail how I approached and taught the course that term, and Diana describes her experience as a student -- we draw from Mary Louise Pratt in calling her experience "studenting" -- that same term.

NCTE, especially Kurt Austin and Bonny Graham, has been a great partner, from concept to cover art.

We hope that our narrative approach to composition scholarship is informative as well as engaging, and that it helps open up new channels of inquiry about the student experience in OWI.

We also would like this book to help refine and enhance not just how we see OWCs and teach them, but how we see our students as collaborators in knowledge-making about our field. We write in our intro, citing many other voices in composition, about how absent student voices can be in our conversations, but we're not picking on comp/rhet: This issue is widespread in education.

Our book aims to be a story of teaching and studenting, of how writers came together in a virtual educational community to work and learn together. Above all, we hope you enjoy it.

Talking on Higher Ed Talk Radio about NCTE OWI Position Statement

So Larry Jacobs and I got to meet again. My colleague and CCCC Best Practices in Online Writing Instruction Committee co-chair Beth Hewett were interviewed last month by Larry on Higher Education Talk Radio about the committee's recently published "A Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction (OWI)." Again, the statement can be found here: http://www.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/owiprinciples (I describe it a bit in my last post).

Larry helps us think about the goals of the Statement, its descriptive nature, similarities and differences between teaching writing online and onsite, and some of the advantages for students of OWI.

If you want to listen to an archived version, check it out here.

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.