Measuring Ourselves: Adapting a First-Year Writing Course for Distance Education

Paul W. Ranieri
Associate Professor
Department of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
(765) 285-8583
pranieri@gw.bsu.edu

The Context

In 1989, six years after receiving my degree from a well-known doctoral program in Composition and Rhetoric, I became director of Ball State University's Freshman Writing Program. That program is substantial--over 400 class sections a year with more than 75 faculty.

Among my early challenges was Ball State’s desire to invest heavily in distance education. We in English were being "strongly encouraged" to "get on board." We couldn't, we felt: how could writing--a set of skills and procedures emphasizing a close mentor relationship between student and teacher, requiring face-to-face discussion, communication, and small group collaboration—be taught using one-way video and a call-in system that certainly could not be confused with being "immediate."

A year later, when we were finally forced to "get on board," none of our tenure-track faculty would accept the assignment. More adventurous were members of our contract staff, our professional, full-time writing faculty. They are excellent teachers, but with little institutional status. Consequently, I would often find myself mediating between their pedagogical needs and those of distance education designers/producers whose strict course development process was better suited to lecture and multiple quiz/test formats. For awhile, every little argument reminded me why we were right not to support this madness from the start.

Accepting a Challenge

Today, as I continue the planning for the sixth incarnation of my IHETS, ENG 103 class, as I ponder the latest adaptations for my studio, live, tape-delay, and cable audiences, as I polish my electronic mail skills, and update my web page, even as I lay out the final plans for the CD-ROM prototype that backs up the 800 page textbook created just for this class, I often feel a bit dizzy with the speed of change over the last nine years.

Ironically, many of our reservations in 1989 are still valid. In fact, a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education documented what critics of technology are saying about those of us who "rush to embrace technology." Those reservations include the following:

• that we often do not consider the drawbacks to a widespread embrace of new technology,
• that we lack a well-thought-out pedagogy sensitive to the developmental needs of students,
• that the technology often emphasizes and reinforces the more machine-like aspects of thinking, at the expense of such capacities as imagination, intuition, and the role of emotions in cognition,
• that technology hinders the expert-apprenticeship relationship so essential in a university environment, rather than strengthens the bonds between students and teachers,
• that technology allows the multitude of external sources to overwhelm our inner abilities to be critical, and finally,
• that technology overemphasizes the role words play in complex thinking, leading many technocrats to conclude that if something is expressed in words, it can be programmed into a computer. ("As educators," 1998)

These reservations, having also served as our objections to that first headlong rush to technology by our institution, are indeed still valid today. My particular conversion began, though, when I asked myself again what I wanted to accomplish with my first-year writing course.

ENG 103—Freshman Composition 1, Spring 1994

Whether taught on campus or on-air, my goals for this first-year writing course are always built on the ancient tradition of the humanities teacher. For me, ENG 103 is a guided study of the role language plays in thinking and in community building, both within academe and within society as a whole. Put another way, I want my students to learn the social and personal power of language, a power that helps humans create knowledge, culture, and tradition. I want my students to realize that language is the one power that defines them as humans, that allows them to express themselves as they create their own niches in the world around them.

In 1991, then, as I watched my faculty struggle teaching writing through distance education, I suddenly realized how distance education could further democratize my classroom, to make available the power of language to other learners while forcing campus students to develop their writing skills for an older, life-wise audience. Suddenly I realized that distance education would force me to put my beliefs in the role of language in society into extended, public practice.

The challenges, however, were daunting:

• The studio was inadequate for a class that required small group discussions and intimate conversations between an instructor and an apprentice writer. My studio class would be 10 students in a ramped room for 100, with desks bolted to the floor, and key pads embedded into desktops for discrete-answer quizzes and tests.
• Video for the class was one-way; the audio in the studio had to be activated for the entire class or none at all. Audio for the distance sites was adequate, but the phone system could not respond to the immediacy required for discussions and tutorials.
• Course development seemed to require each class session to be planned in advance, to the minute. Such advance development could not take advantage of the portfolio system used in ENG 103, a system that requires me to adapt class sessions to current student work and needs.
• Site students’ work, for a class that required multiple, timely responses to essay drafts, had to be mailed back and forth. A few students had access to a fax machine, though then my department did not.

Yet, with a bit of leeway from course developers, some creative graphics and animations by the production staff, a graduate assistant, a writing tutor from our department’s Writing Center, some judicious camera angles, and additional studio furniture, we premiered during spring semester, 1994. By December of that year, we had indeed forced technology to bend to the needs of the class. We held small-group discussions, we adapted each day’s classes to match what was being written by students or student writing groups, and we scheduled around fax and mail problems. Though still frustrated with the studio design, with the sound problems, and with the lack of speed in communicating with students or exchanging paper drafts, we were optimistic for that next fall and encouraged by the speed with which technology was developing—in our direction!

Continual Challenges, Successes, and Further Developments

Neither the course itself nor technology has stood still in the last four years. One thing has not changed—the goals for the course. I am committed to those goals. Any alteration to this class must conform to the goals of building communities among speakers and writers, of improving the speaking, reading, and writing skills that make effective interaction possible, and of mirroring for students the use of language essential for the workplace and the public forum. All else must adapt to these.

That site students can and will respond to these goals is no longer in doubt. Comments in summary evaluations have noted that they now better recognize the power of language, that they are now aware of the variety of ways to respond to a writing problem, that they now value feedback from both peers and more mature writers, that they appreciate the way their essay subjects and essay structures interact, and that they appreciate how language clarifies who they are and what they think.

One distance student, Teresa Bovard Link said it best:

Writing, to me, is empowering. . . . It is an everlasting power people possess. As this English course progressed, I found myself wanting to express my ideas, in my own style, to a reader. . . . I wanted to make the reader aware of the power I had in each essay. I think the meaning of logos [writing/thinking] is becoming clear. . . . I want to read and imagine what thoughts come to mind before people put them into words. I want to put my thoughts into words, so that others, someday, may find some interest in them. . . . After weeks of putting thoughts into words, writing, and reflecting, I too have decided I have this power as my own.

Though I would certainly like to be further along in my progress toward my goals, technology did not fail to democratize my course for a wider, often more mature audience. Besides the changes students highlighted above, the following pedagogical issues and solutions also emerged:

• an awareness of the need to stretch studio facilities for small group discussions of site students’ papers. At times we use a studio group to discuss a distance student’s paper—peers working on similar topics gathered around a discussion table in the corner of the studio. Meanwhile, the student’s paper is shown on the studio camera. The writer is able to comment on the paper and question his/her peers as they discuss it. At other times, we use a pre-selected group of distance students; the instructor moderates comments as again the paper is shown on-air and suggested changes are illustrated using the studio light pen.
• an awareness of the need for selected studio techniques to lessen the spatial gap site students may feel while watching the course. A couple of years ago, I taught a summer graduate class on technology and teaching. A group of these talented graduate students watched a large number of tapes from previous classes, trying to feel the effect of being a site student. They amassed an impressive list of suggestions for how to stage and film small group discussions, lectures, and demonstrations. They suggested camera angles, ways to personalize discussions, and ways to integrate graphics, picture-in-a-picture shots, and subtle stage directions—all in an attempt to close the perceptual gap between what studio students see and feel and what distance students experience.
• an awareness of the need to increase the ability of all students—but especially site students—to contact instructors and each other; to have continuous access to assignments, handouts, and model papers; to have continuous access to read and to respond to each others’ drafts; and to have access to common research sources and tools. One response to these needs has been the development of an extensive WWW site (http://www.bsu.edu/classes/ranieri/eng103), probably the most effective means for improving the collaboration and community of this course.

So, how did all of these changes affect me, the instructor? Working with this course—developing it, helping to produce it, teaching and revising it myself four times—certainly gave me a deeper insight into how I could approach students’ work, how I could better translate concepts and procedures for both 18-year-old and adult students. Four critical examples follow:

• No textbook, no two-dimensional picture can account for the emotion as one watches Martin Luther King speak the night before he died. Watching that video clip and then discussing the power of words and voice tone can unlock relationships I had failed many times in the past to make clear.
• Having our professional animators prepare short clips illustrating such complex concepts as ‘composing" and "metaphor" allowed me to move smoothly from an abstract understanding to a personal awareness of how "composing" and "metaphor" affect an individual writer’s work.
• My colleague who teaches the follow-up course to mine says that she can always tell which of her students have just come from my course because if nothing else, they understand the idea of structure. I realized, hearing this, that my use of abstract models to illustrate expository structures must be enhanced by the consistent, colorful nature of my prepared graphics, and then by my ability to show them side-by-side with students’ actual essays, comparing and contrasting between them using both the overhead camera and light pens available in my studio.
• Finally, after writing an 800 page manuscript of a textbook for use with this class, a manuscript publishers first accepted and then rejected because they felt it was too complicated, I realized how technology has led me to see more and more interrelationships among my teaching strategies, but also how technology has given me the option to design a WWW site and now to begin to encode a CD-ROM which will simplify the written text when all three are used together. In this case, technology has helped me present the complex in a clear, concise way.

After three degrees in education and 20 years teaching experience, I had reached a new level in understanding the relationship between what I do in the classroom and what my students both know and do.

So, where do I go from here in my complicated relationship with technology? The class itself still has much further to go if it is to match the goals to which I am even more committed. First, the layout of the studio has to change. Research done even before the studio classroom was built, if apparently unfamiliar to its designers, had determined that a studio classroom need not look like a lecture hall. Those of us who teach in more collaborative ways should have a voice about the specific features of future renovations. Second, I always have to battle the "distancing" effect television has on students today. I often find my studio class staring at the monitors in the room rather than looking at me in front of them. I have to remember to keep these students as engaged in the class as the distance, tape-delay, or cable students. Finally, Ball State University and the Indiana Partnership for Statewide Education must find a way for distance students to take advantage of the technology I have in my office and studio. The gap is widening. I cannot help wonder how much students might benefit if they had e-mail capabilities in the same rooms in which they were taking part in the class. They could send questions and observations to the studio, allowing us to respond as class progressed. In a broader sense, it is of little use for us to design a web site or ask students to e-mail us their drafts if they do not have access to the technology.

Still, I am confident looking forward because of what I see looking back. I am also acutely aware that I must remain focused on the goals for this class: that I continue with my carefully crafted, developmental pedagogy, that I resist reducing the thoughts in this class to what can be programmed or put into words, and that I resist the urge merely to "gather" ideas rather than to critique, interpret, or synthesize them.

On the other hand, I simply cannot ignore the improved access, the higher grades, the mature thought, the committed writing, and the impassioned voices that have emerged in this course since 1994.

The American author Toni Morrison in her acceptance speech for her Nobel Prize said about the relationship between language and life, "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives" (1994, p. 22). Maybe my work with ENG 103 and distance education has not changed how I see what I do as much as convinced me that increased access, further collaboration, and a heightened sense of community dramatically increase writers’ abilities to respond, review, and re-write. That does not mean that I am less aware of the drawbacks to technology. Rather, I am more aware of what my students and I have gained since that first class in 1994. Considering that, I would not be willing to return to ENG 103 as I taught it before then.

References