Michael: This is
Sherita: Write.
Genevieve: Think.
Chris: Teach.
Jackie:
When I am talking about mindfulness, you can also think of mindfulness as an awareness about writing. And, for me, that awareness is that writing is rhetorical; writing is contextual; writing is not sort of existing in isolation. It’s for a purpose. It’s for an audience.
Cristina: Welcome to Write. Think. Teach. I’m Cristina Rivera.
Tamara: And I’m Tamara Roose.
Cristina: Today we are interviewing Jackie Kauza, the winner of the 2019 Writing Across the Curriculum Outstanding Writing Instruction Award. Jackie is a doctoral candidate at The Ohio State University. She’s taught first-year writing, Technical Writing, Issues and Methods in Tutoring Writing, and the graduate course for teaching new GTAs to teach First-Year Writing.
Tamara: Last year, the WAC team recognized Jackie’s efforts in helping students overcome learning challenges, connecting writing to significant disciplinary concepts, and her own efforts to improve teaching through practice, assessment, and feedback. Jackie works to incorporate writing skills that transfer beyond the writing classroom and recognizes that students are coming from an array of backgrounds. Jackie also focuses her teaching philosophy on making her course responsive to student challenges by having them practice and pay attention to audience and the choices they make as writers through incorporating mindfulness writing practices in the classroom.
Cristina: In this podcast, we ask Jackie about her experiences as a writing instructor and discuss how students can take the skills they learn from their writing courses with them into future courses and even apply these principles to their own lives after graduation.
Jackie:
The primary thing I want them to take away I want them to take away from my course, in terms of transfer, is recognizing sort of how to analyze texts from a rhetorical perspective, so to think, ok: who is the audience of this text, what is the purpose of this text, examining a text to see what are some of the conventions of this text so that they can be able to look at models of sources that they are encountering later in their academic career and understanding who’s writing it, what they are writing it for, and if they are going to be duplicating it, how should they go about duplicating that. Depending on where students are transferring, you as the instructor you don’t always know what skills are going to transfer. So you can’t always say, “Do exactly this, in exactly this context.” But you can say, “Think about what you have done previously. How can you use those skills in this new setting?” So I want to give them a chance to practice so that they can do that sort of analysis on other documents later on. And I make that very explicit to them, talking about: ok, now you know we are doing this sort of analysis; do this in the future. You know, think about if you were given an assignment in another course, you know, look at models of it, if they exist. Look at the assignment sheet. Do this sort of assessment to try and figure out exactly what this kind of document would look like so you can understand what you need to produce. And I think that is a really important that that I want my students to take away, particularly from First-Year Writing is the understanding that there is not sort of one size fits all for academic writing--that they will be asked to do different kinds of writing.
Tamara: Feedback is also crucial when guiding students to be more mindful in their writing. Instructors should focus on and help students identify what they are doing well instead of only highlighting and suggesting what they need to change. Doing so, allows students to not only find strength in themselves as writers but also create opportunities to take their writing skills confidently with them into future courses, since they understand their own writing strengths.
Jackie:
Cuz I think it is really easy as an instructor when your giving feedback to just focus on the negatives. You know, this is what needs to change, this is what needs to be corrected. But I think focus on the positives is very important too so that students can come to a more conscious understanding of some of the choices that they have made and perhaps replicate those in the future in their writing; so they can understand, like ok, I did something that maybe wasn’t as effective here that I’ll need to change but I did something that seemed pretty great here and so this I’ll want to keep and maybe I’ll try that again in a future paper.
Cristina:
Jackie uses backward design in order to give students opportunities to practice the skills she recognizes as most valuable, while still focusing on what they should ultimately take away. While course objectives give instructors a starting point, she considers her own vision of her students’ successes and what would be most beneficial for them to take away. This strategy also allows students to recognize clear expectations she has and what they will need to hold themselves accountable for. It also allows Jackie to allot sufficient time for students to complete writing tasks. Jackie describes how she, as the instructor, mindfully reflects on student work to adapt the course’s content and assignments to better suit the needs of students. In other words, Jackie’s own mindful approach informs what she teaches and how.
Jackie:
I use the two-pronged approach of backward course design, followed up with very deliberate mindful reflection. So when I am designing a course, what I’ll do is think, “Ok; where do I want the students to end up? What do I want them to take away from this course?” And then I will as backward design suggests, I’ll work backwards from that. I’ll think, “Ok; what am I going to be assessing these students on? What do I need to prepare them for? What sort of skills am I going to be expecting them to demonstrate? What kinds of thinking do I want them to be doing in this paper?” And then I want to give them opportunities to practice that. As so, sometimes too I’ll be thinking, “Ok; I want them to demonstrate X. How challenging do I anticipate that being for them?” If it is something that seems it should be pretty easy maybe I won’t do as much practice in class for that. If it seems like its a higher level or more advanced skill, then in the classroom I am going to build in a lot more opportunities to practice that. Then once the class is actually ongoing, I do a lot of reflective work; thinking about after assignments are turned in at the end of the semester, yah know, what worked/what didn’t work? Was something that I thought was going to be easy, actually pretty challenging? If so, in the future, how would I need to revamp my in-class curriculum? Do I need to put in more practice? Did students seem to pick up on something quicker than I anticipated? Maybe I can dial that back in the future? Looking at assignments, you know, does it seem like everyone was hitting the mark on this part of the assignment, verses, a majority of the class really seemed to struggle with this part of the assignment. So, then I can work from that and adapt my teaching and adapt my assignments in the future to sort of address that.
Tamara:
Even though Jackie makes this model of designing a course seem easy, there is always a level of student pushback that shouldn’t be overlooked. However, the questions that Jackie asks herself, aid in capturing not only where students struggle in writing assignments but also where they excel, and, how she, as an instructor, can help her students excel even more. Her own mindfulness and reflection of student work demonstrates the effectiveness in first identifying the learning outcomes that the students should reach and then carefully assessing where students met these outcomes.
Jackie:
Especially, when you’re doing sort of like large scale course design, how can you direct students if you sort of don’t know what you’re directing them towards? You know, how can you reach a destination if you don’t know what path to take to get there? And, I think another thing that helps kind of push back against pushback, as it were, in the classroom is that I make it very clear to the students the how some of the activities that we are doing in class will tie into a next assignment that they are doing. Or I’ll say, “Ok; today we are going to do this and remember this is something that you’re also going to be asked to do in your next paper.” So I try to make it clear that I am not just doing random things--whatever I want to do in class. I am actually trying to help them prepare for their next assignment. And, that seems to work pretty well.
Cristina:
Jackie employs mindfulness not just in the construction of writing but also in the process and generation of writing. She explains that by having students really think about what they are doing when they write and who they are especially persuading, they learn the essentials in cultivating useful writing.
Jackie:
So when I am talking about mindfulness, you can also think of mindfulness as an awareness about writing. And, for me, that awareness is that writing is rhetorical; writing is contextual; writing is not sort of existing in isolation. It’s for a purpose. It’s for an audience. They’re doing a lot of analysis, especially in First-Year comp, rhetorical analysis of texts, of media, trying to understand, you know, audience, purpose, and the steps that this piece of media is taking to accomplish this, within the sort of conventions of whatever genre it is--be it, you know, a graphic novel, a TV episode, a book excerpt. And so, they are practicing all this rhetorical analysis and thinking about these sorts of texts or media as purposeful. And also thinking very mindfully and purposefully about how they are going to use sources in their final paper. You know, when are they going to quote? When are they going to paraphrase? How are they going to introduce sources? How are they going to make justifications for the authority of some of the people writing about a specific topic? And then, students can come to a more conscious understanding of the choices they’ve made and perhaps replicate those in the future in their writing. I want them to understand that the type of writing that they are doing is also something purposeful; it’s for an audience. It’s for a purpose. They are making choices as they are doing this to try and accomplish something. And I’ll try to say, “Those are skills that you can employ in other instances.”
Tamara:
A big thanks to Jackie Kauza for sharing her teaching philosophies and mindfulness approach to help students generate purposeful and meaningful writing. We hope that instructors also benefit from these mindfulness practices when making their course syllabi and the assignments aimed at helping students achieve successful writing practices, so that they can take these skills with them beyond the writing classroom.
Cristina: We hope that you’ve enjoyed this episode of Write. Think. Teach. To listen to the full, unedited version of the interview, please click on the “exetened interview” link in the transcript link below. Until next time, happy writing, happy reading!