Blogging Pedagogy

Coming from a literature background, when I first began teaching rhetoric and composition, I was coming in with very little training in the subject. I spent so much time learning for myself about logos, ethos, pathos, and the rhetorical situation that I failed to engage reflexively with the process of writing. Of course, at all levels of rhetoric and writing instruction we have to strike a careful balance between teaching students how to read and teaching students how to write, but one thing that I've learned over the course of almost three years is that the two processes can come together in a critical and reflective understanding of the processes of invention.

I first began actively incorporating invention (aka pre-writing) practices into my assignments last year in my Spring 2009 Rhetoric of Southern Rock class. The Spring semester usually reflects the wisdom and experience I gained in the Fall semester, but this time I had attended a valuable presentation at the Thomas R. Watson Conference at the University of Louisville. The theme of the conference was "The New Work of Composing," and this panel adddressed how to teach invention in multimedia composition assignments. The big revelation for me was their focus on (1) reflecting on one's experience as a critical moment in invention and (2) juxtaposition. Regarding the former, the panelists drew attention to what we, as writers, often consider moments of intuition, those "aha!" moments that come in the most quotidian of activities: taking a shower, riding on the bus, riding your bike. It is most often these moments when we're less focused on the inquiry at hand that useful insights or questions are raised. But it's also those useful questions and insights that can most confuse students about the process of invention. Students can often feel that they aren't "smart enough" to come up with those kinds of questions, and it can be difficult as an instructor to explain where those ideas come from. After being faced with this lament on numerous occasions, I have learned to draw attention to experience as an inspirational factor in forming a research interst and focusing it into a research inquiry. In, for example, my first two paper assignments last Spring, I encouraged students to begin with musical styles in which they're interested. I had had difficulties in the Fall semester with students making perfunctory decisions regarding what they were writing about, resulting in several people writing shoddy papers about the same topic. In the Spring, greater emphasis on their own interests led to increased reflection on the nature of those interests and their relationship with the material of the course. I then got fantastic papers about, for example, a Children of Bodom cover of CCR's "Lookin' Out My Backdoor" by a student who then went on to cultivate a persona as a hardcore/metal aficionado in the context of his group's webzine. Other students examined more recent alternative, R&B, and pop bands and placed them in a Southern Rock context, which led the entire class to more critically assess and define what we mean by "Southern Rock."

Which leads me  to the topic of juxtaposition:  the panel at the Watson conference was focused on juxtaposing multimedia, but they also suggested that juxtaposition qua juxtaposition can be a strategy in the invention process. What happens when a student puts her/his life experience next to a scholarly argument? What does that juxtposition "create"? And isn't that invention? The same can be said for putting two scholarly articles next to each other: what do they produce? This is, ultimately, what we ask students to do in RTHE306 courses when we ask them to "map" a controversy, but calling attention to the practice itself yields, in my experience, much more fruitful results.

Finally, I want to turn to invention in the Literature classroom. In an enlightening roundtable discussion presented by the American Literatures Group's Academics in Action symposium last Spring, a graduate assistant instructor provided her useful application of Joanna Wolfe's "A Method for Teaching Invention in the Gateway Literature Class." Pedagogy. (3:3) 2003, 399-425. Wolfe provides seven common tropes of literature scholarship to encourage students to begin thinking  about how they want to approach their texts. From a process-oriented standpoint, in my estimation, the tropes Wolfe provides are exercises in juxtaposition within the framework of more focused reading and methodological practices. Translation for students: how does your reading fit alongside the "ubiquity" "appearance vs. reality," etc. model?

I include for my students an extended discussion of the importance of invention with all my paper assignemtns now. I find that demystifying the initial stages of the writing process for students makes the whole process, especially revision, work much more smoothly. Below are some screenshots of my current Invention page, which is mostly text and so kind of boring, but it offers a sense of how I develop the assignment for my Lit students:

For the next post, I'll attend to how various textbooks discuss invention. Most textbooks, I've found, rely on the traditional "brainstorming" and "freewriting" models, which can be useful, but I'd like to explore what other models textbooks endorse.