Why Johnny Can’t Write

Why Johnny Can’t Write, 2017
December 9, 2017 by Accuracy In Academia
Malcolm A. Kline –

If you wonder why college graduates can’t write, you might take a look at what their composition teachers cogitate over.

Next March, they’ll [Conference on College Composition and Communication—CCCC] be cogitating for three days in Kansas City over topics such as:

• “What Is (sic) Writing Studies Made of?”

• “Content Conflict: An Argument for Alternative Approaches to ‘Writing about Writing’”

• “Creating a Transferable Sense of a Writing Self: Findings from a Longitudinal Study of WAW [Writing about Writing]”

• “Transfer or Transformation? Taking New Selves to New Sites of Writing”

• “Kinds of Consciousness: Affect, Metacognition, and Cosmic Minds?”

• “Actualizing Selves in Universes of Discourse: Creativity, Identity, and Exigence in Metacognitive Transfer”

• “Writing-about-Writing and Post-Departmental Support”

• “Teaching First-Year Composition in a College Core Course” (this is actually the clearest they get)

• “Implementing a Writing about-Writing Approach in a High-Stakes Foundational Writing Course”

• “Reimagining Transfer through Multimodal Re-mediation”

• “Fostering Adaptive Transfer through Writing about Multilingual Writing”

• “The Rhetorical Situation and Transfer of Writing Knowledge from Basic Writing to Writing in the Disciplines”

• “Writing about Writing Courses and the Graduate Teaching Assistant: Cultivating Disciplinary Understanding in a Diverse English Department”

• “I Know You Are but What Am I? Engaging and Developing Students’ Sense of ‘Good Humor’”

Students might want to reverse the order of that last one and question whether their ‘sense of good humor’ is being put to a grueling test.
Source: Why Johnny Can’t Write, 2017

TCR Summer Program in MA

The just-concluded TCR Summer Program in Boston in July worked with serious secondary students of history from Arizona, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Nevada, Texas and Virginia in the U.S., and from China, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, and South Korea.

Students studied a wide variety of historical topics of their own choosing, including China’s One Child Policy, Charlemagne’s educational reforms, the rivalry between Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla, art policy in Nazi Germany, the German revolutions of 1848, Native American industrial schools, and Sino-American diplomacy during the 1970s, among others.

Some of the highlights of the program, in the words of students, were: “individual meetings with instructors,” “the personal, one-on-one help,” “reading historical essays/texts written by other people,” “discussion about what history is,” “the unstructured work time we had,” and “the set-up of the day where we had a short lesson in the morning and then independent research in the afternoon.” “I liked the individual meetings with the instructors because getting personal feedback really helped!” “The chance to have individual meetings with the instructors was really useful.”

Information at tcr.org
The Concord Review
TCR Summer Program
Massachusetts
July 1-July 20, 2018