5 Transformation is a Form of Revision

When he was thirteen, my middle son watched a reality show called “Monsters Inside Me” rather compulsively. He was fascinated by people’s bodies as they actually changed from the inside out. One evening, he curled up on the couch to tell me the story of some guy who wakes up to find a giant tapeworm living inside him. What was he now?  Part man, part worm?

“Can that happen here?” he asked.

“Only if you leave some gaping, open wound for germs to crawl through. That’s why I make you use Neosporin when you get a cut.”  I never miss a teaching opportunity.

I confess that I share my son’s love for reality shows, especially when they focus on transformation. I could watch people sledge-hammer their way to an open concept living room all day.  I desperately want the 600-pound woman to have the bariatric surgery that will change her life forever. That’s because transformation is really a form of revision. Revision, the opportunity to re-see, re-think, and re-imagine, anchors my work as a writer and a teacher of writing, just as it undergirds my leadership and service here at Gustavus.

Likewise, in my tenure statement I focused on my ability to adapt to new situations, framing my career as a Darwinian struggle. When I first arrived at Gustavus, I faced unique challenges as the College’s first Rhetoric and Composition specialist and a newcomer to the private college context. I studied student-authored texts the same way that my colleagues study literary ones. I envied chameleons and tree frogs their ability to blend in and adapt to their surroundings. Pre-tenure, I evolved out of necessity, teaching whatever needed to be taught and expanding my scholarly parameters. But I rarely felt in control of my own evolution. As a writer, I know that revision should not be so reactive, driven solely by the expectations of others. Revision should be motivated by the writer’s desire to communicate. It should be a creative process, a rare opportunity to make deliberate choices. Today my teaching, writing, and leadership are strengthened by my ability to constantly revise myself and my work in this more transformative way. And this focus on revision embodies the mission of Gustavus, which seeks to transform students and their lives.

As a writing teacher I help students discern their strengths and challenges, pushing them to surpass their own expectations. My teaching is fundamentally relational, dependent upon both conferencing and conversation. I foster lively classroom communities, and I respond to their work in a way that is enthusiastic, critically engaged, timely, and clear. I want all students—from the most eager to the most reluctant, from those with language processing disabilities to the most fluent—to develop their voices and hone their rhetorical skills.  I invite all students—from those who have been writing in English all their lives to those who have only recently begun to do so—to write persuasively and creatively. I teach a range of writing courses, from Creative Nonfiction to Writing Process to Writing and Nonprofits, as well as an occasional LARS offering, Senior Seminar, or IEX.  Every single course has been a new prep.  I revise courses frequently, responding to the changing needs of students and new findings from my field. The snapshots below highlight course development as a way to address philosophical and curricular dilemmas, support multilingual students, and bring the “real world” and its genres to the classroom.

Revising and Developing Courses to Address Philosophical and Curricular Problems

In 2000 I inherited ENG 212: Intermediate Composition, a non-descript “W” course focused on essay writing in the humanities. Between 2000 and 2015, I taught the course more than a dozen times, reimagining it regularly to meet the needs of both English majors and General Education students, including pre-med students, struggling writers and students with disabilities, and international students.  First I shifted its focus to explore writing as civic engagement. The next iteration considered conventions of academic argument. By tenure review, I retitled ENG 212 “Academic Writing” and emphasized rhetorical practices across the disciplines. Soon ENG 212 alumni began to Skype in to compare their academic and real world writing experiences, and I used parodies from both the sciences and the humanities to interrogate academic writing itself. By the time I returned from my last sabbatical in fall 2015, I could no longer discuss the mythological, monolithic concept of academic writing with a straight face.

The field of Rhetoric and Composition changes as quickly as my oldest son surfs TV channels, and during my sabbatical I caught up on those changes while teaching a graduate seminar in Composition Theory at Minnesota State University. I learned that recent studies suggest students can transfer their understanding of rhetorical concepts (purpose, audience) from a general composition course, and they can develop a writing process that works across disciplines. But little else seems to transfer.  Learning to write an argument in ENG 212 probably won’t prepare students to write a Political Science senior thesis or a business proposal later on.  These findings, along with staffing shortages in English, led me to stop teaching “Academic Writing” and create a new class, ENG 210: Writing Process, instead. The new course replaces both ENG 212 and 247 (Teaching Writing), yet meets the needs of displaced ENG 247 students and WRITI seekers by focusing on the writing process itself. In ENG 210, students read primary literature from Composition Studies, consider the creative process across various mediums (writing, visual art, music), reflect on their literacy histories, and conduct case study research. I taught the course for the first time in fall 2016; student evaluations were quite enthusiastic.

Sometimes I move beyond an Extreme Makeover to create new courses altogether; recently I’ve done so in order to contribute to recent curricular reform efforts on campus. In fall of 2016, I joined an interdisciplinary team to create a two-semester sequence for first-year students that emphasized project-based learning. We clustered three similarly themed sections of FTS—each about environmental challenges—and taught them at the same hour from our disciplinary perspectives (English, Biology, and Communication Studies). This spring, I am team-teaching the second course with Cindy Johnson. IDS 144, or “Digging In: Understanding Ecology and Community,” provides both NASP (natural science) and LARS (literary and rhetorical studies) credit. To prepare to teach the sequence, I read environmentally themed creative nonfiction and poetry, making sure to include the work of women writers of color, such as Camille Dungy and Jamaica Kincaid, alongside more canonical texts by Thoreau and Leopold.  I have no background in Environmental Studies, and thus I connected my areas of expertise with the philosophical concerns of environmental discourse. My FTS, Think Globally, Write Locally, invited students to analyze places in their own lives from an environmental perspective, making connections to conservation efforts on a more global scale. In IDS 144, students study, analyze, and communicate the ecological concerns of a local county park, Seven Mile Creek. They use perspectives from science, history, myth, and visual arts as they interpret their encounters.  (I am also now able to drive a 10 person van.)

Supporting Multilingual Learners

In 2012, I piloted Why Multi Matters, a First Term Seminar (FTS) open solely to multilingual students. I spent two years planning the course, immersing myself in TESOL and ELL composition scholarship. In this course, diverse international and domestic students read and responded to one another’s writing with care and precision while studying how education shapes and challenges their cultural identities. As Writing Center director, I had documented the ways in which many—but not all—multilingual students struggle with writing in college. I understood the pressing cultural, religious, and socio-economic challenges that can impede academic performance. Why Multi Matters utilized socio-cultural context in order to enhance academic performance, especially in writing and discussion.^[1] The class encouraged rhetorical flexibility as students negotiated with one another orally and in writing. I taught it in 2012, 2013, and 2015, revising the course annually to respond to students’ evaluations. Each FTS cohort visits subsequent “Why Multi Matters” sections, creating a network of support that helps them balance the emotional and intellectual demands of life on campus. Combining cohort-building activities such as class dinners with intensive writing and discussion— especially peer review—has proven particularly constructive. I now rotate the course with Thia Cooper (REL), an enthusiastic and inspirational partner. I continue to do research on issues ranging from retention to revision in these FTS classes.

Bringing the Real World and its Genres to Gustavus

My students have always experimented with genre; my students write blogs (Creative Nonfiction and Teaching Writing), Young Adult Novel Openers (Adolescent Literature and Literacy), and multimodal presentations (FTS). But my efforts have been more targeted in recent years. English department alumni frequently work in the nonprofit sector. I developed Writing and Nonprofits to help prepare students for such work. Now I offer it beneath our Writing in the World (ENG 310) umbrella, where students learn new genres and write for real audiences. In 2014-15, as a CBSL Academy fellow, I cultivated relationships with local nonprofits, including Ecumen Prairie Hill and the YWCA. In the course, students first consider the social conditions that make nonprofits necessary—poverty, racial and cultural inequality—while reflecting on their own experiences, and alumni guest speakers describe their work. After studying each community partner’s rhetorical strategies, students then suggest ways to enhance messages. Students use the qualitative methods of ethnographers and the storytelling techniques of fiction writers to develop projects for each partner. Last year, for instance, one team interviewed farmers that collaborated with MVAC’s Food Hub; the narratives became promotional materials. Another team created infographics for the Center for Rural Policy Development, tracing the impact of fine arts programs on rural communities. Finally, every student wrote a grant proposal. This course introduces students to forms of writing that are persuasive outside the classroom. Don’t get me wrong–sometimes it’s rhetorically necessary to teach traditional academic forms: annotated bibliographies, research-based outlines, argumentative essays. But our increasingly globalized, digitized culture urges us to revise our understanding of literacy and its demands. As liberal arts colleges face accusations of impracticality, I feel compelled to teach my students—and myself—to produce increasingly flexible forms, including digital narratives, web content, newsletters, and blogs.

Mentoring and Collaborating with Students

In 2013, I received the Edgar Carlson Award for Distinguished Teaching. In the citation, Alisa Rosenthal wrote: