Computer Mediated Writing Conferences: Transferring the Affective Dimension to the On-line Environment

Chapter 1: Conferencing and Composition Pedagogy

Introduction

When Don Murray first published his groundbreaking piece, “The Listening Eye: Reflections on the Writing Conference,” in College English, he was describing what must have looked to many teachers as an innovative yet potentially risky pedagogy. Now, more than two decades later and after dozens of books and a hundred or more articles on the subject, it’s hard to imagine teaching composition without conferencing.

With consistently reassuring student evaluations, I discover semester after semester and class after class that conferencing is the most emphatic area of feedback from my own classroom pedagogy. When my students evaluate themselves at the end of the semester and write about what has worked for them and why, their answers typically include comments like these:

· “I got the most out of our conferences because it was a chance to sit down, one on one, and get to the core of my writing. The good and the bad.”

· “After the conferences I became much more confident in my writing ability and skills.”

· “The biggest help to me was the peer group and the conferences…. The conferences were wonderful. This was the final time to find out what you could do to improve.”

· “I think the part of the class that gave me the most confidence were the conferences and the group discussions….. In high school I never had that opportunity. I was to hand in a draft and receive a grade, no discussion about it. This form of learning seems very inappropriate now that I have experienced a class that is meant to create better writers rather than to judge them.”

· “The teacher conferences were very helpful because I knew what you were thinking about the essays before I turned them in. I feel that this style of teaching, which is unlike any other I’ve had before, has made me a stronger writer.”

· “The conferences were a great help to my writings. I really enjoyed not seeing a bunch of red x’s all over my paper. It really helped me to actually be able to talk bout the problems in my paper.”

· “I could ask questions and express feelings about my writings.”

· “The one on one helped my confidence and reduced my stress.”

· “They allowed me to share what I thought.”

· “I hope my future teachers hold conferences.”

· “I thought that it gave me courage to work on revisions and other papers.”

· “The gave me motivation/confidence as a writer.”

· “It works wonders and it really can let the student connect with the teacher.”

· “By talking about my essay, I answered my own questions.”

Because I do not grade papers (I grade portfolios), do not mark on papers, and generally only read drafts in peer workshops and conferences, the above comments—which vary only in tone and detail from class to class—provide affirmation of what I most thoroughly enjoy about teaching composition: one-to-one dialog with students about their writing process. Furthermore, I see conferences as the pedagogical opposite of marking on papers. In fact, Murray, in his chapter on conferencing in his 1985 book, A Writer Teaches Writing, calls the correction of student drafts by instructors “irresponsible,” because it takes the responsibility of learning away from the student (170).

Remarks like those above from my students, who often at first seem confused that I don’t mark on their papers but then generally show relief[1], clearly confirm a comment from a teacher to researcher Muriel Harris, who asked teachers to air their own feelings about holding conferences with student writers. With what Harris referred to as “a bit of evangelistic fervor,” one teacher reported, “We’re dreamers or dolts if we think all of our students read those comments we spend so long writing on their papers. A few minutes of talking is far more effective in getting their attention” (4).

The binary connection between conferencing and marking papers is important to me, because I love interacting with students but simply do not have the time nor the patience to make meaningful marks on dozens of essays while at the same time having enough energy to facilitate lively classroom discussion and reflective learning experiences. However, I have wondered just how pedagogically sound my approach is, and I do get some initial resistance at times. I have had more than one student comment in their journals, “You didn’t fix my paper.” As Marilyn Cooper and Cynthia Self so aptly put it for my own case, “The idea that there is no single right way of doing something, no single right way of writing, no single right answer, is difficult for these Midwestern, middle-class students to accept” (854).

So it seems important to look beyond Harris, Murray and the other “evangelicals” of conferencing for some validation of my own reasoning that the time spent in conferences is more valuable than time spent marking papers. Brooke Horvath as early as 1984, while defending marking on student papers, noted “the increasing importance of oral response” (136) and acknowledged that conferences and other oral feedback hold “many advantages,” including providing other readers and reducing the time spent on marking papers.

Much of the research questions both the pedagogy and the efficiency of marking on papers. Nancy Sommers reports that the students she interviewed stated that marginal and end comments on their papers caused revising to become “a guessing game for them” as they try to interpret what the teacher meant and how to meet the teacher’s implied demands, and she worries that teacher comments often “suggest to students that writing is just a matter of following the rules” (Responding 153). Reflecting on her essay a decade and a half later, she writes of the frustration of trying to write meaningful comments. “What strikes me after all these years of teaching is the difficulty of composing a humane, thoughtful, and inspiring comment,” she states (Afterword 130). Making useful comments may even be an impossible task, report Melanie Sperling and Sarah Freedman, describing what they discovered as “the uncanny persistence in students to misunderstand the written response they receive on their papers” (344)[2]. Even direct dialog with the teacher about the written comments often fails to clarify the issues for the student, note Jane Mathison Fife and Peggy O’Neill (307).

Richard Haswell points out the self-defeating nature of many written comments, noting that judgmental commentary harms the “full teacher-student dialogue” that Lil Brannon and C. H. Knoblauch report is a fundamental aspect of effective evaluation for revision purposes. “Judgmental commentary unbalances the teacher-student equilibrium in an authentic learning situation, that is, where the student is doing most of the work” (604).

But Why Conferencing?

Conferencing works because it creates a teacher-student dialogue about the student’s own text as opposed to a one-way conversation about the teacher’s imagined perfect text. Murray, one of the earliest apostles of conferencing, calls it the “most effective” and “most practical” pedagogy in the composition classroom. There are two reasons for this, he says: conferencing allows instructors to view both students and texts as being uniquely situated, something that is “an enormous problem” in a full classroom, and it teaches students how to read and improve their own texts under the encouragement and watchful eye of the instructor (A Writer Teaches,147).

Then there is the issue of evaluation and revision. Lester Faigley notes that although the writing-as-process movement of the 1980s has shifted the evaluative emphasis “from a teacher’s role as judge to one of coach,” most evaluative commentary still “tends to assume that a broad consensus exists about what constitutes good writing and that we can recognize good writing when we see it” (Judging 395). If we are to break out of this narrow mold of what Faigley describes as our Descartian, Western construct of self (396), if we are to deliver some power to students to understand who they are in their own terms and within the “network of social relations” that is “reconstituted in each act of communicating” (411), and thus to claim ownership of their own writing, as he urges, then I see no better place to do this than within a conference in which a student is empowered to do his or her own evaluating.

Beyond what seems to be surfacing in the literature as a consensus that marking on papers can be a poor evaluative choice, Kenneth Bruffee identifies an even more valid reason for conferencing when he describes the collaborative element of the generation and transfer of knowledge:

We establish knowledge or justify belief collaboratively by challenging each other’s biases and presuppositions; by negotiating collectively toward new paradigms of perception, thought, feeling and expression; and by joining larger, more experienced communities of knowledgeable peers through assenting to those communities’ interest, values, language, and paradigms of perception and thought. (646)

Bruffee could easily be describing the conferencing classroom. The difference seems to be the difference between a static classroom, where papers are fixed in time by the marks on them, and the changing and expanding learning environment of the conferencing classroom in which student writing is part of a larger process—a process of knowledge making. As Bruffee succinctly puts it, “Knowledge is the product of human beings in a state of continual negotiation or conversation” (647). This constant conversation, for me, is the joy of teaching and of conferencing.

A Change of Scene:

However, in the fall of 2001, this joyful element of my own pedagogy was set to change when I was asked to teach an online section of English W131, through IPFW’s distance learning center. The course was to be conducted over the Internet, with WebCT software, and I would never meet with the students face to face. Although eagerly looked forward to the challenges, I was equally apprehensive about what I fear would cost me my own most gratifying aspect of teaching: the one-to-one collaboration with students during conferences.

It was this apprehension that led me to this thesis proposal. At first I simply couldn’t visualize conferencing over the Internet. After all, the very nature of conferencing, in my mind at least, involves face-to-face dialog where emotive responses can be viewed, interpreted, checked and enjoyed.

Lad Tobin argues that this monitoring of emotive responses is crucial because it links and balances the three central “dynamic aspects” (Murray calls this the “trialogue”) of each writing conference, which he lists as the student’s relationship to the text, the teacher’s relationship to it, and their relationship to each other. “To be effective, conference teachers must monitor the tension created within and between these relationships and strive to keep the tension at a productive level—for the students and for themselves,” he observes (99). Too little tension, and the conference goes no place; too much tension, and both teacher and student retreat in confusion, Tobin notes.

But just how does one “monitor” a relationship over the Internet? How does a teacher recognize and negotiate “tension” in an electronic environment? These are difficult tasks in which it would seem all the senses need to be employed. Murray (1985), for example, describes just how carefully he observes “body language” and other visual cues in conference: ”I’m constantly looking carefully at the student, trying to estimate if I’ve been understood, if I’ve gone too far, if I’ve gone far enough” (163). So how do you “look” at a student in cyberspace?

With these questions in mind, I omitted conferencing when I first designed my WebCT syllabus, believing it simply wasn’t possible. However, after realizing that the only alternative to conferencing is to resort to marking on papers, or writing long memos and end notes, which Fife and O’Neill warn can be much the same thing (308), I decided to pursue—with trepidation—computer mediated synchronous conferencing[3] using WebCT’s “chat” function.

This decision raised for me some very troubling issues, which I identify in the following pages and pose in the following chapter as a research proposal. First, however, it is important to turn to existing research to learn what precisely makes writing conferences work for the composition classroom and what changes networked technology has brought to this setting so that my research methodology could be designed to fill any apparent gaps in the literature.

Defining the Successful Conference:

Despite its widespread use, many pedagogical questions about conferencing have been raised since Murray’s 1979 article extolling its virtues, and the exact nature of a so-called “successful” writing conference remains hard to pin down. Fortunately, the research is plentiful in this area, and although the answers might be considered to provoke as many questions as they resolve, Laurel Johnson Black (1998) is able to point to the work of Carolyn Walker and David Elias (1987) to identify one distinguishing difference between successful and unsuccessful conferences:

In successful conferences, the focus was on the student and the student’s work, with the teacher evaluating the work and both eliciting and articulating clearly the criteria for that evaluation. In low-rated conferences, however, there were a large number of questions and requests for explanations from both teachers and students…. The focus of the conference remained on the teacher’s expertise as a writer. (Black 27)

In short, the successful conference is student centered, and the unsuccessful conference is teacher centered. Black expands this definition to include the affective dimension, which is about feelings and creates a rewarding yet often problematic personal interface between student and teacher. She maintains that this affective dimension is crucial to successful conferencing because it moves learning beyond the narrow confines of the academy and opens it up to students’ own lives. The affective dimension, writes Black, “ties conferences to classes in ways that are important and personal, not simply institutional” (146).

In fact, Black is so convinced of the importance of the affective dimension that she reports her all-time most painful conference came when she ignored an emotional student’s feelings in conference in her haste to keep to her schedule: “I am ashamed of using my power as teacher to silence Felicia, and tell her, in ways subtle and not so subtle that her feelings didn’t count, weren’t valid, and didn’t even warrant acknowledgment” (122). Teachers who ignore these feelings, warns Black, can miss problems that spill over into the classroom, whereas teachers who acknowledge the affective dimension can tap a rich vein of student discourse and writing topics.

Why Conferences Work:

Black’s concern with the affective dimension is clearly pedagogically sound. The writing conference works in part because cognitive development, according to Lev Vygotsky, occurs in a social environment consisting of discourse. As Kenneth Bruffee puts it, “The view that conversation and thought are causally related assumes not that thought is an essential attribute of human mind but that it is instead an artifact created by social interaction” (640).

If we value writing because of its ability to create a text that is evidence of powerful thinking, then, using Bruffee’s words, good writing is a “technologically displaced form” of good conversation (641). In other words, social discourse—conversation—among students and between students and teachers creates the writerly environment.

Teacher/reader-student/writer “talk” is—or should be—at the heart of the writing conference because, reports Muriel Harris, this type of interaction between an experienced reader and a student writer promotes student ownership of the writing process and “reminds the writer of the importance of writing from the reader’s perspective” (13). Of course, conferencing can fail for some of the very reasons marking on papers fails to achieve desired goals: as Sperling and Freedman point out, when a student mismatches her own values with her perception of those of the academy and of her teacher she “eclipses her own judgment” (363) and fails to make the hoped for sense of the problem solving strategies talked about in conference.

But as Bruffee notes, it is not surprising that such talk is generally a successful pedagogical tool, because “writing always has its roots deep in the acquired ability to carry on the social symbolic exchange we call conversation” (642). Bruffee might say that a good writing conference would have all the hallmarks of a good conversation. Interestingly enough, Black devotes an entire chapter to the subtle but powerful three-way relationship described by Lad Tobin (1990) and Don Murray (1985) between teaching, conferencing and conversation.

The teacher’s job in a conference, reports Murray, is to create a responsive dialog that centers on the text, building a “productive tension” that teaches the student to be both a “creator and critic” at the same time. This is a delicate task, he notes, for an over abundance of creativity can lead to “a self indulgent spatter of words,” just as too much self-criticism can turn the student into “a dog with its tail between its legs, its ears pinned back” (149).

It is important to note at this point—particularly as we try to envision what the online conference is going to look like—that Murray distinguishes between two types of response patterns, only one of which, he maintains, can build the productive tension that marks the successful writing conference. The deductive conference is one in which a student comes to the teacher to be told what is right and wrong with his paper and how to fix it. This sounds remarkably similar to grading papers or to writing memos about papers, something I had at first considered in lieu of online conferencing. This approach, notes Murray, encourages teacher dependency and fails to help the student develop as a reader and critic.

Murray’s preferred response pattern is to cause the student to respond to her own work, then he responds to those responses, always allowing the student to have the last word. This responsive mode conferencing should have the “tone of conversations,” Murray reports (148).

Continuing the Conversation:

The question arises, of course, “Are all conversations equal?” This is an important question, not only for gaining an understanding of what constitutes a successful writing conference, but also to illuminate what may be fundamental barriers between face-to-face conferencing and online conferencing.

For Fife and O’Neill, good response conversations, to borrow a term from Murray, involve strong elements of “surprise and learning” (306). They refine this comment by looking at Richard Straub’s argument that the conversation must be “interactive” in the sense that it “constructs the student as an active, knowledgeable participant in the process of writing and revision” (310). This active participation by the student is critical to learning about writing, Fife and O’Neill state, because otherwise “the student’s contributions to this dialogue become the implementation of the teacher’s writing decisions” (313). A dialogue that creates a learning environment is one, they report, that takes place “on the same plane of writing—on a metacognitive level that discusses possibilities and rationales for writing decisions” (313).

Fife and O’Neill also look at conference conversation in terms of issues of power and authority, calling for a “mutual negotiation of meaning between participants rather than the standard “IRE” pattern of “teacher talk” (Initiation-Response-Evaluation) in which the teacher knows the “right answer” all along (312). To mitigate power and similar issues such as the rules that govern turn taking, topic setting, and determining who is the final authority on the paper and revision strategies, they suggest that the dialogue be structured as a “mutual inquiry” in which students are invited to “begin the conversation, to initiate the process of inquiry by stating their observations, goals and concerns” (313).

Creating this mutual inquiry is the basic element of the conversational response sought in initiating effective revision strategies, reports Richard Straub. He writes that the conversation should “turn students back into the chaos of revision, foster independent, substantive thought in their writing, and engage students in learning how writers and readers work intersubjectively through texts to achieve understanding” (375).

Enter Technology:

With the advent of new technology in composition classrooms, Straub’s metaphor of the “chaos of revision” takes on new—and possibly even literal—meaning as conversations move into cyberspace where many of the elements that determine “understanding” may be missing. Although the pedagogical link between conversation and conferencing to improve writing skills appears to be well understood, early postulates of conferencing such as Murray and Tobin were contemplating the writing conference during the infancy of the net-worked computer age, when “conversation” still meant a real-time, mutual exchange of ideas and information carried out with audible tones. Later researchers and authors such as Fife, O’Neill, and Straub were writing in that same vein also. But this modernistic notion of conversation has radically changed just within the last decade with the explosive cacophony of digital voices on the Internet and the spontaneous construction of thousands of cyber-communities carrying on non-audible, text-based dialog among hundreds of thousands of participants.

So it is not surprising that composition theory as it is transformed by technology in its broadest sense has become a hot topic, particularly since Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe, noting the generally uncritical nature of the literature to date, raised the alarm in 1991 that much of what was being submitted to their journal, Computers and Composition, failed to recognize that computers are “cultural artifacts embodying society’s values” and thus can easily “perpetuate those values currently dominant within our culture and our educational system.” Langdon Winner as early as 1986 explores the unintended consequences of new technology and describes the “utopian discourse” that characterized discussions until then of computers and their impact on society, but much literature on the advent of the postmodern classroom tends to promote the utopian view. For example, Lester Faigley (1992) writes about the ability of networked computers to mute power, class and ethnic markers, and Joan Tornow (1997) writes informatively but glowingly about a networked classroom at the University of Texas-Austin where students do indeed seem to become critical thinkers and better writers due—at least from her perspective—to the interactive discourse enabled by the network.

Enter Postmodernism:

Later researchers and writers, however, challenge some of the earlier assumptions. Susan Romano (1999), while finding that electronic discourses can position women in new sites of power and voice, nonetheless questions just how much social and power markers really do disappear. Janet Eldred and Gail Hawisher (1995) are among the first to address the destabilizing nature of the networked classroom, which “somehow undermines or escapes discursive limits” (331). Looking at studies outside of the composition field, Eldred and Hawisher found that students “behaved in ways less regulated by serf or social norms because cues reminding users of another social presence were absent” (332), a comment which could provide some insight into how a student might respond in a computer mediated synchronous writing conference.

In fact, as early as 1990 Marilyn Cooper and Cynthia Selfe write about a new strain of “disruptive” student discourse that they documented in asynchronous computer conferences[4], arguing that electronic classroom discussions provide “powerful, non-traditional learning forums” because, among other reasons, “they encourage students to resist, dissent, and explore the role that controversy and intellectual divergence play in learning and thinking” (849).

Students not only resist in this environment, they may also act out in new and unrecognizable ways, because the power of the written word over the Internet seems to take on an extra dimension. Cooper (1999) examines the postmodern debate that challenges the assumption of distinction between word and deed, reporting that speech-action theory and language games have “different implications when contemplated in cyberspace” (154). The already fine line between word and behavior tends to dissolve in the networked environment, she maintains, pointing to Julian Dibbell’s famous account in the Village Voice of a virtual rape that took place in LamdaMOO[5] in 1993.

At the same time, students behave in predictable ways too, report Hawisher and Selfe (1991). Far from mitigating power differences and transforming students into active, engaged, collaborative learners, networked classrooms easily replicate all of the traditional discourses, including the discursive efforts students put forth “aimed at pleasing the instructor” (135).

Networked computers may also influence the way teachers act too, of course, and Hawisher and Selfe use Focault’s discussion of Bentham’s Panopticon[6] to illustrate the implications that “the architecture of an electronic network” can easily have on relationships of power in the classroom (136).

Summary:

As is not surprising, the literature on the computer mediated composition classroom is contradictory, due to its evolving nature, among other factors[7]. In general though, it seems to imply that the on-line writing conference, while having considerable potential to free students and teachers from power, race, voice and gender restraints, might easily replicate or even intensify any or all of the pedagogical miscues and failures of a traditional setting. Additionally, it may easily hold the potential of becoming a scene of rather chaotic and disquieting discourse for student and teacher alike. However, exactly what to expect is simply unknown at this time because the precise nature of the computer mediated writing conference and particularly—in both a binary and non-binary sense— its ability or lack of ability to replicate Black’s affective dimension is not well documented in the available literature.

With the advent of networked, long distance learning (IPFW is offering xx Internet-based long distance courses next fall, up from 28 this past fall), pedagogical issues such as the writing conference deserve re-examination in terms of recent technological change.

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[1] Every class, of course, usually has at least one student who expects the teacher to do most of the work.

[2] The writing conference is not immune to this either, they note.

[3] A note on terminology: Throughout this proposal and this project I shall use the term “computer-mediated, synchronous writing conference” to indicate a combination of the pedagogy referred to by Muriel Harris in her work, Teaching One-to-One: the Writing Conference, and the pedagogy of the web-based, real-time conferencing described by Judith Sorg, a doctoral candidate at Ball State University, and James McElhinney, a Ball State education professor, in their research at IPFW which they published as a paper, “A Case Study Describing Student Experiences of Learning in a Context of Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication in a Distance Learning Environment.” To be precise, the term means one-on-one, teacher/reader-student/writer conferencing over the Internet in a chat room or MOO. For brevity, after introducing the term, I will simply refer to the online version of the writing conference as the “synchronous writing conference,” always implying that it is a computer mediated, real-time, one-on-one session between one student/writer and one teacher/reader. For the most part, that teacher/reader will be myself.

[4] A term they use to indicate computer mediated classroom discussion.

[5] An on-line, text-based community.

[6] A multi-storied, circular prison with a guard tower in the middle and the cells arranged along the outside, fully viewable by the guards in the tower.

[7] Faigley, of course, would say that this is the postmodern condition.