Harris, Miles and Paine ask: What happens when the texts that students write become the focus of a writing course? In response, a distinguished group of scholar/teachers suggests that teaching with students texts is not simply a classroom technique, but a way of working with writing that defines composition as a field.

In Teaching with Student Texts, authors discuss ways of revaluing student writing as intellectual work, of circulating student texts in the classroom and beyond, and of changing our classroom practices by bringing student writings to the table. Together, these essays articulate a variety of ways that student texts can take a central place in classroom work and can, in the process, redefine the ways our field talks about writing.

TEACHING WITH STUDENT TEXTS

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments................................................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction Joseph Harris, John D. Miles, and Charles Paine..................................................................................................................11 Re-Valuing Student Writing Bruce Horner.....................................................................................................................................92 Revealing Our Values: Reading Student Texts with Colleagues in High School and College Nicole B. Wallack....................................................................243 "What Do We Want in This Paper?" Generating Criteria Collectively Chris M. Anson, Matthew Davis, and Domenica Vilhotti......................................................354 Teaching the Rhetoric of Writing Assessment Asao B. Inoue...................................................................................................................465 Ethics, Student Writers, and the Use of Student Texts to Teach Paul V. Anderson and Heidi A. McKee..........................................................................606 Reframing Student Writing in Writing Studies Composition Classes Patrick Bruch and Thomas Reynolds..........................................................................787 Students Write to Students about Writing Laurie McMillan....................................................................................................................888 The Low-Stakes, Risk-Friendly Message-Board Text Scott Warnock..............................................................................................................969 Product as Process: Teaching Publication to Students Karen McDonnell and Kevin Jefferson1...................................................................................0810 Students' Texts beyond the Classroom: Young Scholars in Writing's Challenges to College Writing Instruction Doug Downs, Heidi Estrem, and Susan Thomas.....................11811 The Figure of the Student in Composition Textbooks Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori and Patricia Donahue..........................................................................12912 Workshop and Seminar Joseph Harris.........................................................................................................................................14513 What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Workshops? Charting the First Five Weeks of a First-Year Writing Course Maggie Debelius............................................15414 Texts to Be Worked on and Worked with: Encouraging Students to See Their Writing as Theoretical Chris Warnick..............................................................16315 Writing to Learn, Reading to Teach: Student Texts in the Pedagogy Seminar Margaret J. Marshall.............................................................................17116 The Writer/Text Connection: Understanding Writers' Relationships to their Writing Muriel Harris............................................................................18117 Learning from Coauthoring: Composing Texts Together in the Composition Classroom Michele Eodice and Kami Day...............................................................19018 Inquiry, Collaboration, and Reflection in the Student (Text)-Centered Multimodal Writing Course Scott L. Rogers, Ryan Trauman, and Julia E. Kiernan........................20019 Workshopping to Practice Scientific Terms Anne Ellen Geller and Frank R. Cantelmo..........................................................................................21020 Bringing Outside Texts In and Inside Texts Out Jane Mathison Fife..........................................................................................................22021 Embracing Uncertainty: The Kairos of Teaching with Student Texts Rolf Norgaard.............................................................................................229Afterword: Notes toward an Informed Practice Charles Paine and John D. Miles..................................................................................................243References.....................................................................................................................................................................256Index..........................................................................................................................................................................264Contributors...................................................................................................................................................................268

Chapter One

Bruce Horner University of Louisville

There is now a well-established tradition of complaint about student writing in composition. I refer here not to the much longer-standing tradition of complaint that students today can't write, or write poorly, and/or don't write as well as they used to. That tradition, a robust one, continues apace, part of a larger tendency to displace onto literacy what are, in fact, social anxieties-what John Trimbur has argued is a "discourse of crisis" (1991). Those of us in the field of composition studies, in combination with our colleagues in the broader field of literacy studies, have been assiduous in using historical research to challenge myths of a current decline from a golden age of high literacy standards invoked by that tradition of complaint (Brandt 2001; Resnick and Resnick 1977).

But while scholars have been combating those myths, there remains within composition studies itself a tradition of complaint about a putative lack of value to the work student writing can accomplish qua "student writing" with an extremely limited range of circulation-restricted almost entirely to a readership of those attending or teaching a single section of a first-year composition course. In this tradition, the problem resides not with the quality of the writing but with the fact of its location within the academy and, more specifically, the first-year composition course. That location, at least within first-year composition courses as ordinarily constituted, is understood to significantly restrict what the writing can be and do, and hence its value. As a consequence, those attempting to increase the value of this writing, in the eyes of teachers and students, have directed their efforts toward either broadening the circulation of that writing or asking students to produce writing that goes against conventions for student writing. The hope driving such efforts is that they will somehow render students "authors" rather than mere "students," and thus their writing as something other than simply "student writing."

In this chapter, I argue that this tradition rests on limited, if dominant, cultural understandings of the work that can be accomplished by writing circulating only within academic institutional settings. As a consequence, attempts to resist restrictive notions of the work of student writing end up reinforcing those dominant understandings that account for the denigration of student writing to begin with. As an alternative to this tactic, I argue for ways we might work with student writing in composition courses that would offer a valuing of it countering dominant...