Book Reviews

Review by Michael Hustedde

The education issue I hear and talk most about centers on student writing.  At the beginning of each term, I meet with many of the faculty who have taught WI classes during the previous semester.  In addition, I have met regularly with my colleagues in the English department who teach our first year composition course, ENGL 101 Written Communication.  While we all sometimes wish a magic tablet existed which when consumed by our students would result in their demonstrating well measured, college-level writing when handling our class assignments, the complexity of writing and the wide variety of writing tasks our students face in disciplines across the curriculum suggest that no single approach or writing rubric will result in perfect writing from our students every time in every class.

I have been teaching college-level writing since 1982 and have yet to find the perfect approach for even my own classes.  In the past quarter century, I have noticed that my students and their writing have changed, but I’m not so sure that my 2007 students are any less able than were my 1982 students.  One strategy that I used in the 80s which is still applicable today is to expose my students to good writing followed by their practicing the art and craft of writing.  The students’ reading alone (exposure to good examples) will not result in good performance.  In turn, writing and rewriting in a vacuum, in a state where errors are made, marked, fixed, and then made again also will not result in improved writing.   Others have long recognized the value reading has for writing which has resulted in the publication of dozens of comp or rhetoric readers for students of all levels.

This semester, I have adopted a text which was not designed originally to be used in composition classes.  In 1979, John Chaffee, a professor of philosophy at LaGuardia College, City University of New York and the director of the New York Center for Critical Thinking and Language Learning, worked with many others on an interdisciplinary program in Critical Thinking.  One result of his work is the text Thinking Critically now in its eighth edition (2006).  Chaffee views the abilities to think both critically and creatively to be the foundation of learning for his students.  I agree with his position.  When I speak with my colleagues at SAU about the weaknesses their students’ papers contain, the most common concern, even beyond spelling and usage, is that the papers so often don’t say anything or what they do say is disorganized and poorly presented (lacking both style and a recognition of audience). 

Part of the reason our students may have trouble writing well is that the material they are learning is still new to them.  They have not yet internalized the core of the information needed to make sense of the new material.  Some students may read their texts seeing all of the information as being of equal weight and value.  They may rely too heavily on their personal emotional reactions (“I think” or “I believe that…”) or worse yet, they may not be able to make sense of the material at all because it does not connect with their life experience.  These students often simply repeat or rewrite what they have read from their texts (sometimes to the point of committing inadvertent plagiarism)  or heard in their classes without any processing of the information or any application of the information to the more complex tasks we ask them to complete. 

Chaffee asks students early in his text to move beyond passive learning or mindlessness, in the words of Harvard professor of psychology Ellen Langer, to full engagement or active learning of content, mindfulness, through the application of questions based on six categories Benjamin Bloom first suggested in his taxonomy.  The categories frequently overlap, but when students seek answers in their text(s) and beyond their text(s) to the questions, they exercise the kind of mindful engagement that can result in content competence which then can lead to better writing.  The question categories include

Fact: asking for basic information (who, what, when, where, how),

Interpretation: discovering the relationships between facts and ideas),

Analysis: the separation of a process or situation into its component parts,

Synthesis: combining ideas to form a new whole or to come to some conclusion,

Evaluation: making informed judgments based on a thing’s relative value, truth or reliability,

Application: take knowledge or concepts we’ve gained in one situation and apply them successfully to other situations. 

            When students critically engage with course material, they are better able to present their own thoughts in their writing.  With greater confidence over content, more attention can be paid to form thus helping to improve the quality of their writing.  When student writers read often and well and combine that with process writing, higher quality final writing will result because deeper learning has taken place.

            This semester is my first with John Chaffee’s text.  By the end of the semester, I will seek student input concerning the degree to which they feel the book has helped them, if at all.  In turn, I will review the quality of student writing from the semester along with my use of the text to see where I might refine my approach with the tools provided to see if a second semester with the text is warranted.