Fair warning: I have no experience of being a teacher, let alone a composition teacher or a first-year writing teacher. So I am almost tempted to write down "Everything about teaching writing is difficult, and I don't know anything about ways of teaching composition!" But I'm a 23-year old graduate student above that mindset, so I'll give a more satisfying answer based on the articles I read for this class and my experiences with composition and English teachers.
Let me be
perfectly clear: teaching composition and rhetoric seems like a huge chore in
the long run. You’re just in front of students to talk about a subject, trying
to get them interested in that topic. You’re not really a student anymore, so
you can’t appeal to this one instructor. Instead, you have to appeal and get
your message across to all these different students. Some of them are English
majors and are possibly interested in the subject material so they can move on
to further English courses, while others are miscellaneous majors and just want
to get that one or two credits in first-year writing so they can move on to
dessert. The concept of addressing a divided audience springs up what I think
could be the most essential part of teaching writing: Making the ideas of
rhetoric, composition, and writing understandable and engaging to each diverse
part of an audience. To put it bluntly: the most difficult part to teach in the
teaching of writing is being completely able to know each member of the
audience.
Understanding
your audience is so important and so difficult in at least teaching writing, or
anything else in particular. By teaching a mass audience, you’re prone to
generally reinforcing yourself with information you understand. But with a
composition course, you have to know every member of the audience so that you
can develop a better connection and understanding between you the teacher and
the students who are sitting in front of your pedestal. What’s more, you have
to teach them how to acknowledge their own audiences. Because student writing at
first tries to appeal to the teacher or themselves, yet they need to have the
argument appeal to all parts of the party. A student may try to write an
argument that incorporates aspects of logos, ethos, and pathos; but such an
argument tries to spice itself up with pseudo-intellectualism, giant words, and
dry articles that the student can’t really understand. Basically, that argument
is just trying to appeal to a professor for an A+ rather than to all diverse
sections of the potential audience.
The
second graph on the concept of audience that Ede and Lunsford illustrate in their
article actually brings up an important factor that first-year
composition students need to understand. That factor consists of the many
layers that exist in even the simplest essay’s audience. The way I would teach
my supposed class about the addressed and invoked audiences would be to show
this graph, so that students can at least have some awareness of all past,
present, and future versions of the audience that they should be writing
arguments to. I would also make sure to teach students to acknowledge and
analyze all differing opinions to their arguments, without calling those
opinions stupid or mocking them. It’s really easy to gloss over research that
counters your argument to make your opinion sound better, but you have to keep
in mind that some readers actually agree with the other opinions and will put
down the essay now that they see that your argument is biased. Teaching
the addressing and invocation of the audience is hard when your own audience is obsessed
more with grades than with conveying a well-balanced argument. But by showing
them the many aspects of an audience and stressing to the class to write with
other audiences in mind by acknowledging different counter-arguments, I’m sure
that students can begin to have a budding idea regarding how to effectively convince different
audiences at any time or place.
Kevin,
ReplyDeleteI really like how you are talking about the students as the teacher's audience. You're right, of course, and this fact is often over looked. Teachers have the difficult task of engaging students from all backgrounds and interest. I also liked that you mentioned the ways a student tries to appeal to the teacher. This is definitely something we need to look out for and redirect!
Kevin, I had not given much consideration to this as a point of difficulty in teaching, and I think that it is entirely relevant and important to address. When considering the often highly diversified demographic of a classroom, in addition to the multiple sections a teacher generally instructs, it is crucial that he/she understands this diversity and attempts to teach in such a way as to speak to the variety of students. I think one method that might prove useful could be, at the beginning of the semester, to have students draft a brief biographical statement for the teacher. This would allow the instructor to form a general idea of how each classroom is organized in respect to students' interests and backgrounds, and it would further allow instructors to modify their reading and writing assignments in such a way as to appeal to the class as a whole. This method might include a list of reading assignments or writing prompts from which students can choose, which might speak to a larger variety of different values and opinions. Constructing a solid idea of what an audience includes is, indeed imperative for teachers.
ReplyDeleteKevin--It's important to address the question you tackle here, even when you haven't taught before, so that you have a baseline. Your answer will/should change over time, as you develop your expertise in teaching. Yes, appealing to everyone is a difficult thing to do, with such a wide variety of reasons why students are in the class. The majority don't necessarily want to be there--it's a required course. With that in mind, figuring out how to get them to see the relevance of learning audience analysis, clarity of style, etc. is critical. Getting folk to understand differences between addressing and invoking audience types, for instance, as Ede/Lunsford point out, is important. Nice thinking here, Kevin.
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