Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Scholarly Writing: When Students Talk Back


Troy Croom
English 895
Prof. Jennifer Trainor
7 May 2015

When Students Talk Back
BUILDING STUDENT AGENCY THROUGH
DIALECTICAL FEEDBACK

This article examines opportunities of
developing student agency through
dialectical commentary.

Teaching ESL in adult schools for a number of years taught me a great deal in a practical sense about working with students, acknowledging them and their ideas, and making time to help them whenever possible. Returning to the university for graduate studies, by comparison, has informed my thinking in largely theoretical, though sometimes pragmatic ways as well, particularly in the area of written feedback. Two recent experiences from my graduate work led me to write this paper. First, I investigated the literature on teacher commentary; this opened my eyes to a more facilitative method of written feedback. Also, I had the opportunity to observe several professors teaching in their classrooms, including a mentor teacher for whom I was a teaching assistant for a full semester. Despite my years of teaching experience, I found I had much to learn while observing other teachers in action. Together, these two experiences -- the feedback literature review and classroom observations -- made me look at teacher response from a new perspective.

My research helped me realize the great chasm between many teachers’ written commentary and the ideal presented by voices defending facilitative response. (Sommers, 1982; Brannon & Knoblauch, 1982; Lynch & Klemans, 1978; Straub, 1996) Meanwhile, my observations highlighted the significant difference in approaches some teachers choose in connecting with their students. I found that some take a real interest in helping students and making themselves available, while others avoid personal interaction whenever possible. The student-teacher interactions that were so intensely dialectic in some cases, and nearly non-existent in others, offered examples of relatively democratic classrooms, in the former, where student expression can flourish, and rather authoritarian classrooms, in the latter, where directive response can arise, effectively squelching student agency. Teachers and writers have experimented in myriad ways to expand agency. Such steps include offering students a choice of text and writing assignments; building an ethnographic units around student experience; self-assessment; and, of course, advancements in facilitative feedback. Certainly, the movement toward facilitative feedback is an excellent start, but is it enough? We would do well, I believe, to take the current thinking further still.

While feedback studies tend to focus on teachers’ flaws and the need for better feedback, they hardly discuss the greatest implications for commentary -- to empower our students to develop personal agency. For example, in her ground-breaking 1982 research, Sommers (1982) says the purpose of effective response is to let students know if their writing is comprehensible and, if not, how to correct it. Going a bit deeper in her recent handbook for teacher commentary (2013), she posits that feedback’s secondary functions are to demonstrate the presence of a reader and to “help our students become that questioning reader themselves.” (p. xi) While we surely know that feedback tells students how well they’re doing and, one would hope, that it teaches them to write for an audience, still, Sommers’ final point -- helping students becoming questioning readers -- deserves amplification. Feedback can do more than help students question what they read: with a more democratic approach, it can actually help students develop agency.

If this applies generally, it’s especially true when we give students license to truly “talk back” -- commenting on teacher commentary as well as the revision at hand. For some teachers, this could be a radical move since, in many writing classrooms, teacher feedback is not open for discussion. I feel avoiding such discussion is a missed opportunity for developing students’ critical thinking -- learning to see both their own work and their teacher’s suggestions through what Rosenblatt (1988) calls “authorial reading.” (p. 9) Rather, I suggest we encourage students to continue the dialectic of debate, building upon the “back-and-forthness” of the classroom, (Jackson & Wallin, 1996), boosting agency by “conversing” with their papers (Salvatori, 1996) and, later, with their teacher through office conference or email. Teachers who write feedback with an open mind to student-teacher dialogues are engaging in what I call dialectical feedback. The goal is not necessarily to welcome a cross-examination of teachers, though this may occur, but to aid students in learning from our experience how to read their papers more effectively and how, with new liberty, to better question all that they encounter -- in the words of Paolo Freire (as cited in Kern, 2014), to “read the world.” I posit that this perspective can lead to student empowerment and boost student agency. ( p. 36)

This paper will offer thoughts on dialectical feedback through five moves. First, I examine the scholarship on in my literature review. This leads to an explication of student agency and how dialectic feedback can help build it. I then discuss potential classroom challenges in applying dialectical feedback, including a shift in the student-teacher power dynamic. Next, I examine two effective models that can help us move toward a new feedback approach. Finally, I offer some thoughts on the praxis of dialectical feedback.

Giving Voice to Feedback
First, what do we mean when we speak of feedback? I take feedback to mean written commentary, addressing form or content, with the goal of motivating students and clarifying objectives to improve revisions. The literature on feedback issues asks how teachers give feedback in reference to the ideal and recommends steps to re-direct teachers who seem to be missing the mark. For years, composition scholars have been discussing the degree of control that a teacher ought to wield when she lifts her red pen to respond. Studies have shown much feedback is too directive or authoritative and students could better be served by a more facilitative approach. (Lynch and Klemans, 1978; Sommers, 1982; Brannon and Knoblauch, 1982; Straub, 1996) Also, research has shown that much response is arbitrary, inconsistent, contradictory (Sommers, 1982; Brannon and Knoblauch, 1982). Ironically, writing instructors, so insistent that students write with clarity, all too often leave vague, bewildering notes (Sommers, 1982; Lynch and Klemans,1978). Indeed, some actually misread student texts, imposing their own readings, frustrating student writers (Brannon and Knoblauch, 1982).

Even more frequently, teachers tend to over-correct, addressing form and content simultaneously, marking every error in sight, so that, without clearly prioritized instructions, students may feel the need to address all surface errors before the paper’s meaning can be attended to. (Brannon and Knoblauch, 1982) Nancy Sommers notes that many teachers trained in literature analysis are likely to address student writings with the same scrutinizing eye. (1982) Similarly, Brannon and Knoblauch (1982) find teachers tend to respond to papers from “the vantage point of the Ideal Text,” (p. 159) with a persona that’s paternalistic and controlling. They note that, by appropriating student writing, teachers show students that the teacher’s agenda is more important than their own. Rather than usurp student work, these writers appeal to teachers to focus on what the writer wants to say, with the assumption that the text reflects the writer’s intention, recognizing that even inexperienced writers possess a logic and purpose.

There is no shortage of advice for teachers who appropriate student writing. In Richard Straub’s “The Concept of Control,” (Straub, 1996) he cites several ways teachers are called on to re-imagine their role of teacher-as-reader. Jeffery Sommers, he notes, wants teachers to be collaborators, not judges; Robert Probst calls on teachers to abandon positions of hostile reader and gatekeeper, “making pronouncements from on high.” Joseph Moxley admonishes teachers to quit treating student writers as “army privates following orders.” (p. 225) 

Where Sommers and associates’ initial findings focused on the ineffectiveness of feedback, Straub’s study finds directive commentary can be actually antithetical and hypocritical to the modern Composition classroom designed to encourage democracy and lively debate. Indeed, increasingly, students are urged to ask questions, anticipate counter-points and generally learn in a dialectical way in all areas save one. But when it comes to teacher response, a student is presented little or no opportunity to discuss the teacher’s critique and how it impacts the paper. More conventional teachers may assume students will simply accept their feedback without question, as if it were the objective “truth,” but, as Berlin (1988) remarks, such an undemocratic perspective reflects the “authoritarian classroom.” (p. 491) This can stymy progress made in an otherwise open, dialectical course by dampening student expression. By contrast, a student who feels her ideas are honored in a dialectic might more likely buy in to the revisionary process with a sense of agency. Ironically, then, it stands to reason that even teachers who pride themselves on facilitative feedback are missing a key opportunity to expand student agency if they aren’t engaging in dialectical feedback.

If this is so, it’s difficult to explain why there’s been little discussion about committing to a real dialectic between teachers and students. James Berlin speaks of a “dialectical collaboration” between student and teacher where the two are equals. (1988) Kutz, Groden and Zamel (1993)address the teacher-student relationship as co-authors and co-researchers, each party attending to the other’s ideas for the improvement of the writing. Others (Jackson and Wallin, 2009; Crosswhite, 1996) illustrate how dialectic can promote a student’s feeling of inclusion with the opportunity to ask questions and raise objections. Perhaps the most influential words on the dialectical classroom come from Paolo Freire, (as cited in Bartholomae et al, 2014) who sees student and teacher as partners, working together to share ideas and find answers. In this model, the teacher presents material and, upon encountering student input, re-considers her earlier views.

Yet, even with this interest in dialectical pedagogy, there’s been no scholarship directly addressing the opportunities that dialectical feedback can offer. This paper will examine these opportunities. I will explore re-creating, not only the teacher’s role, but the teacher-student relationship at the feedback stage on compositions, examining the benefits and challenges to building a dialectical exchange toward improved student agency and compositional revision. First, I will examine agency -- why it’s vital, how it’s created generally and how dialectical feedback can help develop it specifically. Then, I will offer some practical models to suggest what dialectical feedback looks like in the Composition classroom. In this way I hope to underscore the importance of re-imagining teacher response through the rhetorical lens of dialectic.

The Benefits of Agency
As Composition teachers, we spend copious amounts of time trying to encourage students to re-work their writing with the hope that they will consider our comments in their writing, synthesizing new, improved drafts. But what if they don’t use the comments? Perhaps this suggests that they don’t understand or agree with them. Yet another possibility is that students don’t feel adequately included or validated in the feedback process and resent or reject commentary out of hand. For some students, feedback can feel like a one-way street since they may have no opportunity to discuss teacher response. This lack of exchange leads to a dead end, a truncation of communication, reaffirming the authoritative power imbalance in the student-teacher relationship where the student has no choice but to follow directives or disregard them. And what a disappointing experience that can be, especially at the feedback stage: after developing the insight and the nerve to offer arguments and counter-arguments, when it comes to reading a teacher’s notes, in most traditional classes, the student is utterly without recourse. Arguably, this sabotages the pedagogical intent to build student agency.

But what, exactly, is student agency? As used in rhetoric, this term derives from the philosophical understanding, defined by Merriam/ Webster, as the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power. In the student-centered classroom, then, we want to help students develop a sense of capacity, self-confidence and independence from the teacher versus the passivity found in students in an authoritative classroom. Of course, how a teacher does this is a matter of some controversy. Some view agency as “an attribution made by another agent, that is, by an entity to whom we are willing to attribute agency...It is through this process that mutual attribution agency (produces) the agent.” (C. Miller, 2011, p. 150) In this perspective, the teacher is key in instilling the student with a sense of agency, while others hold that agency comes by from taking action and shouldering responsibility (M. Miller, 1984; C. Cooper 2011). This explains why student-centered pedagogies put choice and responsibility in the hands of the student.

To my mind, agency emerges and impacts learning in this way: Choice leads to Personal Interest, fostering Engagement, leading to Action, then to Responsibility, which leads to Satisfaction and Agency, re-energizing the whole circle of agency. For example, a student picks a text she enjoys from a selection of options (Choice). She finds that trusting her own predilections pays off because, the more she interacts with this Choice, the more she enjoys it (Personal Interest); the more she enjoys it, the deeper involved she becomes (Engagement). As she applies this Choice to an challenging activity (Action), she finds she’s invested herself in a voluntary way where she commits to finalizing the project to the best of her ability (Responsibility). This brings about a sense of achievement (Satisfaction) that builds a sense of self-confidence, capacity and independence (Agency), which fuels the desire to delve deeper still into working and learning. According to this model, all our pedagogies and all student activities come back to building agency.

If this is true -- that agency fuels learning -- then agency ought to be a chief goal for the Composition classroom. Ironically, however, conventional feedback is antithetical to the dialectical spirit we, as Composition teachers, are supposedly trying to stimulate in our classes. While we give free rein to students to debate topics in order to engender nimble minds for critical thinking, and to readily envision each point’s counter-point; while we speak about the importance of developing voice and agency through give-and-take with the discourse community; when it comes to feedback, we too frequently cut short the exchange, missing, I think, an important opportunity to extend the dialectical lesson that augments student agency. Of course, agency is only one quality among many that we might care to engender in students. We also strive to help them write with a sense of authority and voice, for instance. Still, it could be argued that even building these qualities activities leads to building agency. Ideally, we’re steering students toward empowerment and independence, where their ever-growing confidence leads them to take on greater challenges, expanding their capacity. Thus, if student agency is a prime objective, we would do well to design it into feedback methods.

If the generally accepted understanding is that student agency comes from increasing student involvement at every stage of the curriculum (e.g., student choice of text and activity, self-assessment), we need to include students in the feedback process as well. To create a dialectical exchange, students need to know they’re being heard, that they’re being validated as writers. A dialectical approach to commentary -- removing the last bastion of hidden authoritarianism in the student-teacher power paradigm -- promises to improve student agency and student writing as well.

Dialectical feedback, as I see it, is an extension of the democratic classroom, where students are welcomed as equals, even while acknowledging, one hopes, the depth and breadth of knowledge and insight that a teacher can offer. Of course, the idea of student-teacher equality has limits due to a teacher’s considerable training and commitment, as well as her responsibilities for vision and leadership in the classroom, earning her a unique degree of authority, but without acting authoritative. When it comes to assessment, the teacher’s final decision ought to be final, of course; a paper’s final grade should not be open for endless debate, out of respect for practicality and the teacher’s responsibilities. However, ideally, before that point of finality, teacher opinions about a paper would remain open for discussion. All of this has the goal, not to empower students solely for some abstract cause, but specifically to give them every opportunity possible to improve reading and writing and, ultimately, to develop agency. As Nancy Sommers (1992) writes, “It is in the thrill of the pull between someone else’s authority and our own . . . that we must discover how to define ourselves.” (p. 31)

Some see the student-teacher relationship as the chief challenge to a classroom dialectic. In my opinion, so far as creating an authentic dialectical pedagogy, Paolo Freire’s democratic classroom is the strongest model. As Freire (as cited in Bartholomae, Petrosky & Waite, 2014) points out, in the traditional classroom, the teacher’s function is to “‘fill’ the students with information,” as if they were empty bank accounts, passively, helplessly in need of care. (p. 219) Kern (2014) posits that students have learned to accommodate authoritative teachers in passive ways, even if this behavior prolongs structural inequities. What’s needed, Freire (2014) opines, is a democratic classroom where teacher and student are partners or “co-investigators.” (p. 222) Instructors with an interest in research might take less issue with Freire’s model, given that they are accustomed investigating their world and themselves. On the other hand, this might present more conventional teachers with a confusing new paradigm, especially if they assume they already know how to run a classroom and that student-teacher power dynamics are fixed in place. Of course, in the years since Friere’s influential writings, many teacher’s minds have opened and and many pedagogies have turned student-centered. Yet for our purposes, these questions remain:

  • How can we extend this concept of the democratic classroom to the stage of feedback on student writing?
  • What are the benefits?
  • What obstacles block the way?


The Dialectical Classroom
First, we need to check our attitudes as teachers. To what extent are we prepared to commit to a democratic classroom? The manner that we address students in feedback begins with our own persona on the first day of class, as Nancy Sommers assets. (2013) Are we authoritative or affable? Are we distant or approachable? How ready are we to honor student questions (even “inappropriate” questions)? Crosswhite (1996) offers that “Timeliness and seeing things from the students’ points of view are everything in teaching written reason.” (p. 130) In this way the teacher’s main objective is to compassionately connect with her students, making herself available when possible, and responding to student writing in a timely manner. Next, whenever possible, we need to make choices that involve students at every level of the curriculum. How do we confer choice to students in the texts they read? In writing themes? These are important ways to offer students choice and to build agency in the democratic classroom.

In regard to written response, we need to see student papers as dialectical conversations with the opportunity to promote the revision process, as opposed to treating working drafts as if they’re the end product, where we deposit information and judgement like some Freireian banker. By contrast, Nancy Sommers (2013) sees the response process as an exchange with a student who begins by asking implicitly, “‘How do I write a good college paper?’” (p. 2) Indeed, before she even reads a single paper, Sommers (2013) asks students to write about their writing in what she calls Dear Reader letters. In this way she gets better acquainted with students, asking questions that help her respond to their papers. A teacher, Sommers notes, can help shape student response to Dear Reader letters by supplying certain questions, for example:
  • What are your paper’s strengths?
  • What would you like me to respond to in particular?
  • What would you change if you had two more days to write?
With Dear Reader letters, Sommers notes, teachers can better curtail feedback, making it less verbose or high-handed, less likely to “spew a long list of points that need to be fixed, and more likely to remember that end comments ought to be specific, not generic, and written form one writer to another.” (p. 25)

In a similar way, in The Discovery of Competence, Eleanor Kutz and colleagues(Kutz, Groden & Zamel, 1993) further explore the student-teacher relationship and, with it, the process of correspondence and feedback. Where Sommers implements Dear Reader letters -- usually one per student per draft -- with a three-teacher team, Kutz et al have the uptopian option of one teacher entirely devoted to correspondence and written response while two other teachers instruct in the classroom. In this way, teacher and student have the time and freedom to exchange a virtually unlimited number of letters or emails discussing students’ writing. In both the correspondence models of Sommers and Kutz and associates, students’ ideas are honored and addressed in response, and they have the opportunity to engage in address a real audience with a real purpose, giving relevance to their learning. Of course, in the latter, student and teacher have the chance to develop a familiarity, if not intimacy, that promotes student questions and commentary, and they have an ongoing opportunity to read and learn about correct usage of grammar and syntax simply reading the text of someone they already respect. In fact, according to Kutz et al, there’s little or need for direct teaching in surface language since students tend to acquire it through indirectly through correspondence.

If Kutz and colleagues’ feedback comes closest to the Freireian ideal, the question remains whether an open dialectical feedback is any guarantee against teacher co-opting a student paper. In fact, at the end of the day, a teacher is free to write whatever she cares to write in commentary. Dialectical feedback may not offer an iron-clad check-and-balance for preventing teachers from usurping student papers, but it does present the next best thing: students voicing their opinions in defense of their own writing, and this is probably the best we can hope for. Moreover, for all the scholarship and fist pounding to denounce directive feedback, short of developing a dialectical commentary, no other theory or model, so far as I know, comes closer to ensuring that teachers employ facilitative feedback.

In giving students a chance to respond to teacher feedback, Kutz et al have gone some distance to closing the student-teacher gap on feedback since, before a draft is even complete, student and teacher have likely exchanged numerous notes about the paper’s development. However, the same could not be said for Nancy Sommers’ model. While her Dear Reader letters help to increase student-teacher understanding and rapport, her students have no established recourse to teacher feedback, aside from, one presumes, the conventional method of seeking out a teacher in office hours. Depending on the teacher, this falls some distance from Freire’s (2014) ideal where the teacher is frequently reconsidering her text and her stance including, potentially, written response based on students’ reflections. Such a teacher, according to Freire, is “no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who himself is taught in dialogue with the students.” (p. 22)

Given Sommers’ feedback methods, Freire might not fully approve since, in her approach, student-teacher dialogue is, by definition, limited, especially compared to the fully dialectic response of Kutz et al. On the other hand, it should be noted that, while she does not offer open-ended correspondence with students, Sommers (2013) uses other student-teacher writing vehicles to cover some of the same ground. First, students are asked to write a one-page revision plan, explaining what they gleaned from teacher comments and outlining their courses of action. This provides students a meta-analysis of teacher feedback and urges them to take responsibility for steps in revision; at the same time, it provides a kind of “contract” between student and teacher while ostensibly removing, or at least reducing, the traditional top-down power dynamic.

Second, Sommers asks her students to critique her feedback methods. Just as the Dear Reader letter gives students a voice to direct teacher feedback, the paper for student response to teacher feedback puts agency in the hands of students while giving the teacher a clear idea about how to be respond in a more efficient manner. If this falls short of the Kutz and colleagues’ pedagogy of open-ended correspondence, nonetheless, it informs teachers, empowers students and brings students and teachers together.

The feedback methods of both Sommers and Kutz et al offer giant leaps forward toward opening lines of communication between students and teachers, providing teachers invaluable information for re-evaluating their methods of response, while extending the circle of agency already developed in the classroom. In contrast to conventional “banking model” teachers, it would stand to reason that instructors borrowing concepts from Sommers or Kutz and associates are approaching the goal of building agency through actively listening to students in authentic dialectic.

Final Thoughts
Given, most classrooms don’t have the luxury Kutz and associates have, where two teachers teach while another takes the feedback responsibilities. Indeed, for a conventional teacher, even without the various steps that Sommers employs to give students voice, the paper load for the typical Composition teacher is often difficult to manage. How, then, can a teacher hope to augment student agency at the feedback level with a methodology that’s sustaining and not debilitating? After all, building student agency is a noble notion, but unless it can be done by practical means, it could be counter-productive to long-term classroom management. Certainly these are valid concerns and should not be underestimated.

The good news is that the first step in moving toward a more dialectical approach might be easier than it looks. Trading authoritative feedback for facilitative, for starters, means commenting more judiciously, more empathically, but also less, quantitatively. As we learn to control the impulse to share every pearl of insight, and to resist re-writing student papers (no matter how badly they might demand it), we leave the reins of power and creativity in their hands and, at the same time, reduce the hours formerly committed to “fixing” student papers.

Next, perhaps the most sensible way to work toward a dialectical classroom and toward dialectical feedback is to expand operations in a step-wise manner, incorporating new methods piecemeal. One useful step to inuring students and teachers to embrace the dialectical model would be to explicate, whole class, student writing as classroom text. By discussing student writing together (whether from a current or past cohort, or from a textbook), students -- especially student writers -- become accustomed to speaking their perspectives and defending them, and teachers become accustomed to accepting conflicting opinions or explaining their own thinking (while dialing down the defensiveness, ideally). In this way, students get increasingly comfortable with voicing their ideas and they get the benefit of working with teachers in what Norgaard (as cited in Harris et al.) calls a “shared inquiry.” (p. 232) This sort of interchange with students might make some teachers bristle at first. But if we honestly want our students to write authentic papers, they need to be free to ask authentic questions, and present authentic arguments, which may, occasionally, conflict with our own, or other students’, perspectives. At times, this can put us, as teachers, in an uncomfortable position. As Norgaard explains:

     The prospect of exploring our own minds in public can unnerve even the most hardened       classroom veteran. It’s easy to feel that we can’t afford to get it wrong, that we’re likely to make a mistake, or that we’re sure to come up against some difficulty we can’t immediately resolve. The worst thing we can do is fear these possibilities. If fear prevents the flowering of the mind, students will take their cue from us and fear taking the intellectual risks we tell them are so educational. (p. 242)

In order to become comfortable with students talking back to teacher commentary, it can
benefit teacher and student to work together sharing opinions on a more frequent basis such that both parties accept the notion of “shared inquiry.”

Since some students may be shy or otherwise reluctant to comment on teacher commentary, the next step toward dialectical feedback might be to encourage students to read teacher feedback critically, with the intention of applying it in revised drafts, and to ask questions in office hours, conference or emails, as time permits. Of course, if a teacher isn’t already conferencing with students, this might be an excellent way to move toward dialectical feedback. If students tend to avoid asking questions even after being encouraged to do so, this could indicate that a teacher might benefit from self-assessment.

The Composition teacher has been compared to the man in the circus, trying to keep a dozen spinning plates twirling while playing “Dixie” on kazoo. With all that’s expected of a teacher, it’s easy to become overwhelmed to the point where survival mode is seen as the optimum and projecting an approachable persona seems an impossible luxury. Yet this is essential if students are to be comfortable voicing questions, whether in the classroom or in a discussion of teacher commentary. Possibly the most empowering means for a teacher to take on dialectical feedback is to return to the opening of this paper -- focusing not on our flaws, but on the vast opportunities that await us and our students as we open our doors to listen.






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