Bourelle, Tiffany, et al. “Reflections in Online Writing Instruction: Pathways to Professional Development.” Karios: A Journal of Rhetoric, 15 Aug. 2015, http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/20.1/praxis/bourelle-et-al/index.html.
Summary
The article “Reflections in Online Writing Instruction: Pathways to Professional Development” is a webtext that “maps” out or explores the ways online writing instruction (OWI) can be used and can incorporate graduate students as well as departmental faculty. It discussed a mentorship program between more experienced educators and TAs as a method of training for online writing instruction (OWI). The article juxtaposes the set-up for a graduate level “Multimodal and Online Pedagogies” course designed and taught by one of the authors with the experiences of a few teachers of an online course at this institution. What resulted from the pedagogy class set-up was the co-teaching of one specific online writing class between two instructors. It explores the experiences of both “veterans” and “novices” in OWI to open up the points of view available to the reader. It also touches on the importance of institutions incorporating OWI based on the large number for-profit online institutions currently available. It also brings attention to the gaps that exist in OWI that are frequently filled by writing centers or other academic support programs.
Quotations
“Or, teachers experience frustration when students lose focus and disengage with course material or the online community in general.”
“Without pedagogical training, educators may feel unprepared to teach in the online realm (Gabriel & Kaufield, 2008), remaining unsure of how to encourage social interaction and establish communities, aspects of which are all integral to online students’ success. They may not understand how to create an online persona or form relationships with their students; therefore, structured training of online pedagogy can encourage instructors to learn new skills that will help them design their courses around new methods of instruction—methods that may feel unfamiliar to them beyond the f2f setting.”
“In this way, students can start to feel more comfortable with multimodal composition from the onset of the course. Other lessons I’ve learned are how to have meaningful discussions with students beyond the structure or technology that is available in Blackboard. For instance, many of the graduate students have scheduled weekly Google Hangout sessions where the first-year students are required to attend one session. These types of interactive discussions help students get to know their peers and instructor on a more meaningful level. Other graduate students have had success in creating and integrating social media tools such as Tumblr and Facebook pages as ways to encourage more community building, and I plan to try these activities as well. Overall, the seminar class has taught me that my pedagogy, no matter how successful it seems to work in the online class, can always be improved.”
“The team-taught model ensures that students have numerous channels from which to receive feedback on their projects, and many form closer relationships with the IAs than with their instructors, feeling more comfortable turning to these peer mentors for help in the course.”
“In an f2f classroom, I can connect to my students during our class time and during office hours, but in my previous experiences teaching online I felt like my students were disassociated from one another, me, and the institution. Even when replying to e-mails or participating in discussion boards, there was frequently a lag time between when students posted and when I could respond, or when I posted and they could respond.”
“From the moment I entered the LMS, I realized that online education did not necessarily have to be cold and impersonal. Within the first three weeks, students had not only introduced themselves via discussion boards, but they had written biographies on the home pages of their e-portfolios.”
“In the age of for-profit online colleges, it would be naïve to say that online education is, without question, good, necessary, and beneficial for all students. However, what I learned through my apprenticeship in eComp is that by paying attention to the design of online learning environments and the training of online writing instructors (who are, in many cases, future faculty), we can harness the untapped potential of online learning environments to make education more equitable, accessible, and hospitable to a diverse group of first-year composition students.”
“We turned to our institution’s writing center, the Center for Academic Program Support (CAPS), for help, and they were able to provide and pay undergraduate and graduate IAs to work with us.”
Reflections
The first thing that I was curious about was whether the breakdown of discomfort would happen now. When Bourelle et al. discusses how introduction of online writing classes causes discomfort among educators, they use a citation from 2008—and though Jackie Grutsch Mckinney’s article “New Media Matters: Tutoring in the Late Age of Print” came out in 2014 (a year before this article was published) it’s still difficult to imagine such a negative reaction to the building of persona in an online classroom now in 2018. At least looking out from my own experiences as someone who very much grew up in a pro-catering of your online persona. The “Instructional Assistant: Novice” section does seem to have a better handle on how the online space works rather than a real discomfort in the online space that seems to be present in a lot of literature I’ve seen surrounding OWI. Even Beth Hewett seems to have a little bit of anxiety surrounding it when looking at her piece in the Bad Ideas About Writing.
Reflecting on the class one of the authors taught and designed incorporating Scott Warnock’s Teaching Writing Online: How and Why was a good move because that book provides some very straightforward and accessible moves for OWI, even if you haven’t taught it before. It kind of lays out a clear path for how you can instruct an online writing class and why it is effective to do it that way.
Though it is interesting that the group co-taught these online classes, I think that it would be interested in comparing the experiences of someone co-teaching versus someone teaching solo, because from what I’ve read of OWI, I imagine it being a lot easier to teach solo online than be negotiating that space with someone else. This, for me, specifically relates to issues of authority. It might be interesting to think about the implications of this how it relates to the authority model laid about by Smulyan and Bolton in the article I used for NCPTW.
What I found most interesting was the enthusiasm the “novice” assistant reflected with. She engages with ideas of accessibility in online spaces which is definitely a route I’m interested in looking at. I haven’t done a lot of reading about text accessibility or disabilities studies and the incorporation of these into a class or other situation more directly. I can see ways it’s incorporated into the curriculum, but other than that I don’t have any theory to grasp onto.
I don’t quite how know this article could be useful for me. It doesn’t quite relate to FYC directly, and didn’t necessarily pose any new information to me. I’m also not designing a graduate level course on how to teach online, so although that section of the article seems interesting and helpful for professors (possible) is is not helpful for me right now. I don’t foresee this piece informing any of my further research at this time, which is unfortunate. If I were to design a graduate class about “eComp” as they refer to it in this article, this might be a good stepping stone, but it certainly did not peak my interests in anything that wasn’t already on the list of online writing thoughts or ideas.
OWI has always interested me, too, though I haven’t ever taught an exclusively online course. The closest I get is a kind of flipped course, where much of the discussion and labor happens online, and in class we reflect and do excursuses. Folks always have degrees of discomfort when moving outside of the modalities they’re used to. Like you, I’m kind of surprised that in Kairos in 2015 that anxiety should still be treated as something interesting to study. In our context, I often think that we as teachers are more comfortable with the digital than our students are–at least, more comfortable at seeing digital tools as part of literacy. Encouraging them to think about their digital identities and digital rhetorical powers can often be a key way we usher them into thinking about writing more capaciously.
There’s lots to think about here. The Research and Writing Studio is currently doing some research on the online tutoring services they offer, for example. Even if this doesn’t play in to the work you do this quarter, I hope you keep these ideas around.