Author: Derek Mueller

Cooper/George/Lynch, 1998, “Moments of Argument”

/ Derek Mueller

 Cooper,
Marilyn, Diana George, and Dennis Lynch. “Moments of Argument: Agonistic
Inquiry and Confrontational Cooperation.” On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays, 1975-1998.
Ed. Lisa Ede. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1999. 390-412.

Big Idea
George, Cooper and Lynch, teaching from Michigan Tech, call for more
sophisticated argument pedagogies in this essay.  They begin by waving off
the slew of textbooks that introduce argument as a simplistic binary, a scheme
of either/or, right and wrong, often setting up hypothetical tensions and
straw-thin oppositions.  The trio historicizes cooperative models for
argument, juxtaposing them with caustic models.  They invoke Susan Jarratt,
citing, at length, her call for "composition instructors to rethink their
objections to agonistic rhetoric and conflict-based pedagogy" (391), and
John Gage, for his concern that "the real conflicts are already there at
the outset of a disagreement" and that teachers ought to draw students
toward cooperative, collaborative interchanges toward a shared sense of social
resolve (394).  The authors also acknowledge the rootedness of their
central research question–toward an improved model of argument in writing
pedagogy–in their own teaching.  To that end, George, Cooper and Lynch,
propose the blend of "agonistic inquiry" and "confrontational
cooperation" so that teachers and students might see "argumentation as
a crucial social responsibility–an activity that requires us to position
ourselves within complicated and interconnected issues" (411). 

Monday Morning
Before wrapping these notes up and putting them to blog (this is the bit I’m
doing last), just wanted to make a few pieces about my experiences teaching
argument as argument.  Once I inherited an argument-based course. 
Last minute appointment, two-alarm shortage.  Usual adjunct drill.  The syllabus was already written (ugh!) and the text already ordered.  I don’t remember the name of the textbook, but I do recall its onerous simplicity with respect to polarized arguments.  

Sample assignment: Pick a side:  For war or for peace.  Go.  

Continue reading →

Cinco de Mayo

/ Derek Mueller / 4 Comments

 

You have an array of talents from which to choose. 
People find you attractive, charismatic and interesting.  You have a
strong will and can be very convincing.  Your personal color helps
you integrate joy with stability.  Wearing, meditating or surrounding
yourself with Kelly Green allows you to honor any phase of life that you
are encountering.  It reminds you to place equal value on both your
inner development and your outer position in society including
professional merits. [color-chooser via cgb]

Provided that Earth Wide Moth ages in perpetuity, there’ll be future
birthdays to blog.  On this one, my 30th, I’m content to note that I’m
flat out exhausted from house refurbishing (two new phone jacks and glued-down carpet today) . If we had put candles on the cake tonight, I would have wished for a picnic with other May Fifthers: Karl Marx, Ann B. Davis, Kenneth
Burke.  What would we talk about?  Stuff from this day in history
could start us off.  From there I’m sure somebody would think up something to converse on. Or there’d be croquet, just in case.  Stuff that happened on May 5:

1382 – Battle of Beverhoutsveld
– population beats drunken army
1862 – French army intervenes in Puebla, Mexico: Cinco
de Mayo
1944 – Gandhi
freed from prison
1955 – US performs nuclear test at Nevada
test site (Teapot
Apple)
1958 – US performs atmospheric nuclear test at Enwetak
1969 – 23rd NBA Championship: Boston
Celtics beat LA Lakers, 4 games to 3
2000 – Conjunction
of Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn & Moon

Almost But Not Quite

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

Since I got home from work at 4:15, I’ve been on my knees doing two things:
A. replacing the wooden base molding in the kitchen and B. scraping the nasty
glue-carpet residue from the front step.
Altogether, it took me about four hours.
The molding turned out great, but I shouldn’t be trusted with power
tools.  
The things I was doing with the miter saw, well, they’re not appropriate for any
weblog.  
And I was home alone.  
Sawing outside while it was sprinkling.House4sale: electical plugs included.
Our realtor is stopping by tomorrow at 3:00 p.m.  
He’s going to shoot a picture of the front of the house. 
An entry
is creating a stir over at the weblog for EN106. 
The face-to-face semester ended for me this morning; exams will trickle in from
the online crew through the weekend. 
All that molding stuff and glue scraping: my knees are swollen like seedless
grapefruit.
Resorted to some kind of glue-softening gloop for the splotches of resistance on
the front step.  
The gloop ate through my rubber gloves, probably altered my fingerprints.
Collin’s entry
from yesterday inspired me to mess around with a sideblog today during
lunchtime. 
Following Anders
Jacobsen’s example, I learned that without succumbing to php, I could create
a second, stripped-down index file for the second blog, save it as an .shtml
file, then script it as an "include" in EWM.  
Okay, so this is horribly unintelligible.  
It ended up looking like this. 
Maybe I’ll grow a sideblog (what for?) or an embedded photoblog (yeah!) one day.
Yesterday, it was switch upgrades.  
Out with the two-slotters; in with the grounded receptacles.  
Technicality: They’re grounded through neutral, but it still prevents electrocution
for the most part, so says my brother who showed me how to wire the
switches.  
Main thing is for the appliances and such to come on when they’re plugged into
the new switches.  
And nothing in the house should emit smoke.
The important election-contest
was much quieter today than yesterday. 
I was pleasantly surprised to find, upon review, that EWM doesn’t have any
off-topic, meandering posts.  
None! 
And only one
random picture of dinner.
Tonight, sandwiches: near-Elvis sandwiches stacked with
whatever we pulled from the fridge and smashed between two slices of potato
bread.
Twenties for a moment: tomorrow would be my 30th birthday, except that I ascribe to the notion that there are no birthdays after 29.

Muchiri, 1996, “Importing Composition”

/ Derek Mueller

 Muchiri,
Mary, et al. “Importing Composition: Teaching and Researching Academic Writing
Beyond North America.” On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays, 1975-1998.
Ed. Lisa Ede. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1999. 352-371.

Big Idea
     Four university composition instructors
collaborated on this article, "Importing Composition," to address the
global reach of research and prevalent assumptions disseminating from the capital centers of knowledge in the field.  Composition research often suffers a narrowed utility when it makes its way into the variously removed, distant contexts.  Muchiri’s group sets composition in the US against trends in English Language Teaching (ELT) abroad, where writing pedagogies are (almost always) combined with communication studies, where content reigns superior to personal narrative, where examinations hold greater assessment value than coursework, and where limited institutional resources make one-on-one mentoring and extensive essay-marking impractical. The project seeks to stir further conversations on these matters.  Other key issues are the political and institutional pressures proliferating a "dullness of correction and compliance"–the idea that students might not be willing to take risks because they fear failure or rebuke; Kenyan and Nigerian students often align into note-sharing groups whose solidarity is often seen as a form of resistance to the teacher’s authority; the field’s research map as a geography marked by "distant and powerful research centers"; and composition research’s assumption that students have multiple chances and plenty of time to move toward proficiencies.

Terms of Export

L1 – primary language; L1 studies are language studies in one’s primary,
native language

English for Academic Purposes (EAP),
English for Specific Purposes (ESP) – academic categories commonly
used to name departments responsible for teaching practical communications in
English aimed at mobilizing students’ progression toward advanced study
dependent on basic English literacy and "immediate needs."  

English Language Teaching (ELT) – Unlike L1, ELT sets out to work with
students who come at English as a second, third or fourth language

mwakenya (Kiswahili, pro-democracy movement),
Nondo (Kiswahili, crowbar),
Kombora (Kiswahili, missile),
Ecowas (Economic Community of West African States)–vernacular terms shared
among students to name their systems of group resistance to institutional
forces.  Such resistance takes the form of note-sharing and
collaboration–collaboration that might be characterized as cheating in a
rigidly individualistic assessment system

Continue reading →

On Shopping for Paint, Buying Some

/ Derek Mueller / 4 Comments

We’re officially in phase I of home-sellers’ sprucing.  Walked Lowe’s
tonight for just over an hour: paint supplies, ceiling fan light bulbs, a light
switch, door stoop outdoor carpet (to replace the ragged mat uglying up the
front step right now…it’s all nicked up from someone’s overzealous chipping of
ice cakes this winter…I’m not naming names), and fairy dust for a few
well-placed gleaming glints to attract the new homeowner’s affection. 
Lowe’s in Kansas City on a drizzly Thursday night while Survivor All-Stars
is on: it was so empty we couldn’t find anyone to mix the paint. Until we found someone.

Now, if I can just figure out how to apply a cascading style sheet to our
living room walls, neutralize the bold green just a mite…then I’ll have more
time to blog tomorrow and over the weekend on

1~Who is the audience for this? 
Is it just more higher ed doom and gloom warning of the perilous market? 
To what end?  Is it meant to discourage students?  Scare people away
from advanced study?  Or is it building toward deeper critiques about
crises in contract labor?  Plenty of other careers and prospects for
fulfilling employment suck.  Okay, right, I don’t pay attention to those
articles either–if they exist at all (on how much it sucks to study athletic
training, then take a job rubbing the feet and necks of strangers, or how much
it sucks to take a law degree, then haggle in traffic court for the rest of your
days). 

2~Muchiri, Mulamba, Myers, Ndoloi on "Importing Composition"

3~Eyeing an instructor listserv for folks teaching the FY composition
sequence and intro to humanities in the computer-mediated distance program at my current Uni.

4~Saying farewell to graduating students (who I had in FY comp four years
ago!), lining up returning work-study students (all two of them) with warm and
agreeable supervisors for the fall, and putting a box of free stuff outside my
office door to see whether any of it holds a value for passers-by.

5~Catching heat about the final examination arrangement required by the
administration for the FY composition sequence, then packing up a loaded
email-response on the crapshoot, IMHO, of flat assessment systems for online
composition, then sending off that email to a bunch of folks, then waiting to
see whether I left too much tail hanging out in the whole process.

Perfect.  Now I’ve got plenty to write about in the days ahead. 
No. 2 is a certainty; all else, as paint to these walls–spread thin, soon
forgotten.

Irreducible Bits

/ Derek Mueller

With a new CMS provider officially in place, the U. is open throttle prepping online instructors to teach in the eCollege platform.
I helped critique the instructor training course over the weekend; the
self-paced course was released yesterday. Estimated time of completion: 1-3
hours.  Current instructors must pass the summative assessment at the end
of the course with an 80% score.  I don’t have immediate plans to teach in
the eCollege system, although I might pick up one course this summer before the move to NY in mid-July.  I’ll continue to
shoulder responsibility for the FY sequence as their developer, but my faith in
the whole arrangement remains in an awkward, delicate balance.  I’m
concerned by some of the outcomes-oriented initiatives freshly blanketing the
curriculum–without sensitivity to disciplinary difference–as the programs
brace for a fall accreditation visit.  Late-semester fatigue has me
preferring a brief entry here tonight, and it’s better if I don’t go too far
with the deep angst I feel about a few messages in the self-paced instructor
training program.  For fun, here’s one chunk of the instructor training
course that, well, I’m sure you can guess what I think of the view that chunking
enhances online content.  Granted, design affects the ways we read words
and images on the screen.  The stuff about short paragraphs, bulleted lists
and an abundance of headings…*sigh*. I passed the "summative
assessment."

Strategies for “chunking” content: 

  • Strive to keep Online paragraphs between two and four sentences long. Block paragraphs, like the ones illustrated on this page, maximize white space, providing a visual cue of how you have chunked the information. 
  • Differentiate discussion from illustration by shifting format (for instance, from paragraphs to a bulleted list). 
  • Use headings to signal new chunks of information–and their relationship to one another–and to help the user navigate the page.

Thirty or so of the questions at the end were T/F like this:

6. In a threaded discussion, controversial topics or assigning students to argue one side of an issue may be used to engage learners. (Points: 1)

And the others were the loose accumulation kind, as in, check all that apply.

Which of the following are phrases from the U.’s mission statement.  (Check all that apply.)

Blue Red

/ Derek Mueller

So I’m not the only one who thinks the Pistons mig htha veach ance this
year.  There’s Matt
Goukas.  I watch a few games during the NBA Playoff; the regular
season is an abomination, and why would anyone prefer it with all of the college
hoops airing?  Usually I mute the early rounds of the NBA postseason, but
once in a while a series will culminate in a grand tie-breaking contest. 
Then conference finals are usually pretty decent, competitive.  And the
finals have been a bust of late.  All West.

This year, there’s the team from Detroit.  Figured by posting this now,
it’d be long buried by the time it all plays out (since they’re presently at a
3-1 advantage over the Bucks)–in case I’m way off, of course.  I didn’t
think they made a wise coaching change last season (what was wrong with
Carlisle, exactly?); I didn’t approve of their selection of Mililic ahead of
Carmelo Anthony (are you kidding?  yeah, the Pistons could have selected
Anthony!), and I doubted their move to acquire hot-head Rasheed Wallace from the
Blazers.  But I still root for Motown when it comes to NBA basketball, and
they’re playing the best defense in the league.  With lots of role players,
lots of variety, and a defense-first concept, I say it’s Detroit this
year.  Just maybe.

Fitzgerald, 2002, “A Rediscovered Tradition”

/ Derek Mueller

 Fitzgerald,
Kathryn. "A Rediscovered Tradition: European Pedagogy and Composition in
Nineteenth-Century Midwestern Normal Schools." CCC 53 (2001): 224-250.

Big Idea
Midwestern normal schools at the turn of the nineteenth century were fertile
sites for promising pedagogical mixing which brought together student-centered
European practices (attributed to Heinrick Pestalozzi and John Frederick Herbart)
with the populace-serving, democratizing missions of normal schools. 
Fitzgerald’s historical account of the Oshkosh conference of 1900 elaborates
these forces through descriptions and analysis of the archival gems pointing
back to the important work of the normal composition teachers of the era. 
Pestalozzian and Herbartian pedagogies generally favored student-centered rather
than content-centered approaches.  As a result, the normal schools in
Wisconsin served as a stage for these pre-Dewey practices to foment toward
efficacy, while shrugging off strict adherence to textbook lessons, adopting a
more compassionate, respectful view of students’ linguistic competence and
preferring demonstrations of understanding–often in the form of writing and
students teaching to other students–over rote memorization and recitation.
Fitzgerald’s essay ends with a plug for the study of teaching practices in
contemporary and historical contexts (quartered by regionalism and
institutionality).  She also emphasizes–at the end–the role of teaching
in the curriculum as vocational/professional/normal schools have been subsumed
into grand research conglomerates where pedagogy is relegated to servile rank
and often viewed as a necessary but unpleasant burden. 

Continue reading →

Canned Meat

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

Things I’m doing that shimmied a wedge between me and EWM over the weekend:
1.  Cut part of the lawn.
2.  Worked on a C’s proposal.
3.  Walked around.
4.  Plowed through an emergency review of the instructor training course
for eCollege and my U.  Only a few minor tune-ups along the lines of
preferring higher order pedagogies (uh…fill in the blank, mult. choice?) and
affirming disciplinary difference. 
5.  Sent off notes re contingent faculty in computer-mediated distance
writing programs toward an upcoming statement.  Or something.
6.  Tidied a bunch of crap for a garage sale on one of the next
Saturdays.  Cheap!
7.  Spruced up week seven of intro to humanities before posting the latest
threads for the week that starts tomorrow. 
8.  Started reading Kathryn Fitzgerald’s perfectly historical article on
"Rediscovered Tradition."
9. Listened to an Elvis Costello CD.
10.  Tried to get a grip on one of Jenny’s always-smart ideas over at Stupid
Undergrounds. Still wondering if I got the grip.
11.  Munched on specialty pizzas tonight: chicken cordon bleu with green
olives and buffalo style chicken.  D. and Ph. brought up three video tapes,
let me choose.  Over Forest Gump and Being John Malkovich, I
took Slingblade.  So we watched and savored the pizza.
12. Tacked about over in the corner.