Notes toward a plenary talk

Incredibly, I am giving a closing plenary talk at CASDW 2018 in Regina. I'm not sure how this happened but here are my ideas for titles. Will probably go with the third one for maximum sexiness*.

Who teaches writers? Mutilingual students and the disciplinary division of labor revisited

Who will teach writing? Mutilingual students, writing, ESL, and the disciplinary division of labor revisited

“They Literally Can’t Write a Sentence”: Ideologies of writing, multilingual university students, and disciplinary divisions of labor

Disciplinary Division of Labor Revisited: L2 writing and composition across the (Canadian) university

In a nutshell, I’ve been interested in looking at who is tasked with teaching “writing/ language/ communication” to an increasingly multilingual student body in Canada/North America, and how disciplinary divisions and ideologies contribute to how writing/language/communication instruction is conceived of and carried out at the institutional level and whether there is hope for rapprochement between, say, composition/writing studies, applied linguistics/TESL, and other general areas/approaches.

*I overuse the term "sexy title," but it really captures what I mean for it to mean -- a sexy title in academia is one that provokes people into being interested using something they already feel strongly about, often a current theoretical approach or topic of interest in the field, or in this case, a common experience many have likely had of hearing a colleague say something.

Love and education (to be continued for a long time probably)

The 1989 Statement of Education Policy Order sets out the vision of an “educated citizen” who will “think clearly and critically” and “adapt to change.” “The broad aim of the public school system should be to foster the growth and development of every individual, to the end that they will become and be a self-reliant, self-disciplined, participating member with a sense of social and environmental responsibility within a democratic, pluralistic society.”

BC Teachers' Federation Members Guide, AGM resolution, 1994.

"What we need...is to rethink our educational self-image and subordinate the critical moment to a pedagogy that encourages the risks of love’s desire." 

R.R. Reno

Listen: "To know the world we have to love it." (Wendell Berry) If I can? When I'm able? Should the circumstances allow? If I have the time? The permission? The funding? The right school? The right kids? No. Love is not an outcome of the right circumstances but a cause of right circumstance.

David Jardine

starting year 3 (or 11?)

This September marks my tenth year as a university instructor (2 in China, 6 during my PhD, and 2 as a "real" faculty member). Here are ten things on my mind at the beginning of the eleventh.

1. Starting the schoolyear with a concussion feels like an apt metaphor for my present life. Everything makes me tired, and I have aches and pains that come and go unexpectedly and are troubling, but underneath it there's a grim determination to carry on and do good work under the circumstances. Maybe a little more slowly.

2. I watched a small boy throw up on his desk in a kindergarten classroom this morning. This also felt apt.

3. I'm realizing more and more that I can't force people who have more power than I do to make better (in my eyes) decisions. The challenge is to figure out how to balance what "the System" says you have to do with what you think is genuinely beneficial to students. If I let myself get too discouraged by fighting losing battles about curriculum, I'll go nuts.

4. I'm less certain than ever about how research intersects with my job, but still plugging away at some possibly interesting projects.

5. From Sept 1, 2015 to Sept 1, 2017, my yearly salary has increased by approx. 13%. This is mostly due to union stuff -- collective bargaining, cost of living increases, etc. -- but some of it is merit-based, and I feel very blessed.

6. On an unrelated note -- or perhaps not -- a senior colleague recently commented that it was too bad I couldn't get a "good position." I feel more acutely the TT/NTT divide than I used to. I'm not sure if this will continue, and I hope that whichever side of that divide I were on I'd want to engage it, because it's weird and bad.

7. Somewhat related to #3: one of my main goals for the centre where I work this year is to lead a committee looking at an initiative to implement a university-wide first year EAP program. I'm really excited about this, but I can also imagine getting so wrapped up in it that I get really burned out and disappointed by the inevitable roadblocks. Looking at student language/writing stuff from the institution's perspective -- or from administrators' perspectives, I guess -- can be very disorienting and discouraging to a workaday instructor. But it doesn't have to be.

8. Another major project this year: I'm co-chairing the Symposium on Second Language Writing here in Vancouver, the first weekend in August. It'll be held at the downtown campus of my university. This will be a ton of work, but I'm looking forward to it.

9. I'm also supposed to be working on/finishing a book for Cascade, which I really want to do but haven't been able to find the time to.

10. Also, I have to apply for permanent residency in Canada this year, ASAP, so I can keep my job. Yeep!

Tips on (or Genre Features of) Academic Blogging

I wrote this for a class I taught last year, but I thought it was useful enough to post here.

Academic blog posts can be written in a freer and looser style than traditional academic writing. Feel free to write about academic subjects in a more conversational way – using contractions, slang, and colloquialisms is appropriate, to a degree. You don’t have to do this, but getting your point across is more important than following the conventions of Writing a Good Term Paper or whatever.

Think about how much ground you’re trying to cover. A short blog post (1000 words is more like a maximum than a minimum for blog posts) can only probably cover one issue in detail – don’t try to tackle every aspect of a complex issue, but focus in on what interests you (and readers) the most.

Write for a “general reader.” (Even though multiple editors have told me that no such person exists.) Imagine a well-educated reader who does not know much about your topic – maybe a well-read fellow student who hasn’t studied the things you have. This will mean avoiding jargon and explaining things that might not be familiar to non-specialists.

Linking is one of the great advantages of academic blogging – rather than having to scroll down to a reference list, readers can click right on whatever you want to point them to. There are no rules about how to do this, but in general, it helps to give readers a sense of what they’re getting into when they click – probably at least some combination of author, title, publication, and general topic will be useful. Feel free to link to anything you think will be of interest.

Brevity and readability are probably bigger concerns in blogging than they are in traditional academic writing. Consider writing in relatively short paragraphs. (Speaking of paragraphs, indentation is not necessary and looks weird online – leave a space between paragraphs instead.) The use of lists and bullet points can be beneficial in getting your point across.

On a related note, images and other design considerations, like headings, fonts, the use of space, and so on, are much more important in blogging than in traditional academic writing. Think about how the visual organization of your post impacts the reader. Would supplementing a post with an image of the thing you’re writing about help readers understand your topic? Would headings help readers understand where you make shifts in topic or argument? Could visuals that are not directly related to your argument add something to the post? 

(Don't forget to use images that you have permission to use without paying for – read this for a useful primer.)

Finally, the following articles offer useful advice on academic blogging in general:

• Seven reasons why blogging can make you a better academic writer Pat Thomson, Times Higher Education
  https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/seven-reasons-why-blogging-can-make-you-better- academic-writer
  
• Effective Academic Blogging
  Joe Essid, Writer’s Web http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/blogging.html
  
• How to Write an Academic Blog
  Corey Tomsons, Thought Capital https://thoughtcapital.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/how-to-write-an-academic-blog/ 
  

On Shadow Academia

I've been kicking around this notion of "shadow academia" for a couple of years, inspired by the definition of Shadow Cabinet from the British parliament system:

The Shadow Cabinet is a feature of the Westminster system of government. It consists of a senior group of opposition spokespeople who, under the leadership of the Leader of the Opposition, form an alternative cabinet to that of the government, and whose members shadow or mark each individual member of the Cabinet.[Wikipedia]

Shadow Academia as I am coming to conceptualize it describes the activities of a group of academics usually (but not always) outside of the Anglophone Centre (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) whose activities and scholarly output resemble those of the Anglophone centre at a surface level and are done in ways that somehow mimic "traditional" Anglophone-centre academia, but are not recognized by and/or are clearly and deeply sub-par when compared to "traditional" academia. I have to be careful here, because good work can be and is done in shadow academia, but its key feature is mimicry or aspiration to appear to be Anglophone-centre without being so. This is a loose definition that I'm just trying to develop, so bear with me, but I think Shadow Academia includes, on both the student side and the scholar side, what I'd call "para-academic" institutions and practices.

These include, on the scholarly side:

(Potentially) predatory journals and publishers: Much has been written about this, and a colleague and I have a book chapter on the subject out soon, but essentially these are publishers that charge a premium for a rubber-stamped "peer-reviewed" publication. Crucially, these journals/publishers are frequently branded as "international" and are published in English, and the majority of the scholars who publish in them are from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe -- places where the requirements for promotion are strict and involve publishing in English-language international journals. Not all these publishers are strictly "predatory" -- many exist in a copacetic and symbiotic relationship with academics in non-Anglophone-centre contexts who need the publication venues and are unable to get published in more "mainstream" journals. Graduate students in the Anglophone centre are often taken in by these publishers, publishing articles in journals that only sound legitimate or publishing dissertations with vanity presses. While these things can help scholars in other contexts, they can damage the careers of people aspiring to work in the Anglophone centre.

Spamferences - Similar to predatory publishers, these are conferences that exist pretty much solely to pad CVs, make money for organizers, and, occasionally, give academics excuses to travel to tourist destinations.

The next two on my list are more student-facing, and rather than mimicking Anglophone-centre practices, they exist in tandem with or in a sort of meta-relationship to Anglophone-centre academic institutions and practices:

Ghostwriting/contract cheating services: These exist in an interesting grey area between legitimate and necessary services like editing and tutoring. Often targeted at international students via flyers on university campuses or social media platforms, these are basically paper-writing services staffed by grad students or out-of-work PhDs who will write pretty much any academic paper, from a short essay to a thesis or dissertation, for a chunk of cash. I can say anecdotally that there's a perception among academic staff that this type of cheating is rampant among international students -- particularly those from China -- in the Anglophone centre. I personally don't believe this, but I've been surprised in the past and hope to do more research on it.

Test prep, study abroad prep, and study abroad agencies -- I mostly know these in a context that involves the Chinese international student diaspora, if you will, though they all exist across the globe. This is basically a para-academic industry focused on prepping students to go abroad. New Oriental is the prime example, but there are myriad businesses with varying degrees of legitimacy and/or shadiness. Some are clearly unethical/illegal -- stories of faking credentials abound -- but others are more ambiguous, like the tutoring/exam prep services advertised at my institution, taught by recent graduates who can provide current students with notes, copies of old exams, etc.


There are probably more businesses that would fit into the rubric of Shadow Academia (holler at me with suggestions), and I'm not sure that all four things listed above all belong in the same general category. But the fact is, these mini-industries would not exist if there were not a huge demand for education and/or scholarly activity that is perceived to have at least the four following allegedly positive qualities:

• English-medium
• International
• "Western"
• Association with "Highly ranked" universities 

This is what I'm thinking so far. This is more complex than I've had time to get into here, but this is developing. Let me know what you think.

The next few years of conferences on my radar

This was a crazy conference year -- CCCC, AAAL, TESOL, CASDW/Congress -- too much. Not even done yet -- I'm just starting the season and I'm spending all my PD money. I need to pace myself a little, and I think I can.

so, assuming 2017 is basically over for me conference-wise, here's what's on my radar:

2018:  Congress (CASDW) in Regina for a couple of days end of May - giving a closing plenary.  Also, I'm co-hosting SSLW Aug 2-4.

2019: Congress (CASDW/ACLA-CAAL) at UBC first week of June = no-brainer. For sure. Not much else on the radar at the moment.

2020: AAAL and TESOL are in Denver, which is where my in-laws live. Pretty sure I'd go.
[UPDATE: CANCELLED BY A PANDEMIC!]

2021: CCCC is in Spokane, where my parents live. Pretty sure. I'll go unless they've moved by then, and probably would still go!
[UPDATE: submitted, but there's STILL CURRENTLY A PANDEMIC so who knows?]

2022: aiming to go on study leave for this year -- where? what? dunno yet.
[UPDATE: Mainly depends on the PANDEMIC!]

Not sure where SSLW/IAWE are but if they are in cool places I might try to hit each one up 1x in the next 4 years too. So far IAWE hasn't been close enough for me to want to try to go since 2010 when it was in Vancouver!
[Update: Never went to IAWE; have been pretty regularly going to SSLW. It, like everything else, was cancelled in 2020.]

On doing writing but not composition

I wrote this on this bus this morning, inspired by Frederik DeBoer's piece " We Don't, In Fact, Know What Works in Composition." 

While a large portion of my teaching and research involves the teaching, learning, and practice of academic writing (much of it at the undergraduate level), I do not or cannot primarily consider myself a “compositionist.” There are a two major reasons for this that I can discern:

1)    My academic training. I have an undergraduate degree in English literature and “creative” writing, and an MA in English, but after that I made a fairly clean break with “English” as a discipline. (I’ve talked about thisbefore, but like many people who plant their flag in a vague territory called “writing,” I’m obsessed with disciplinarity.) Even while I was in my MA program, I aligned myself mainly with applied linguists even as I enjoyed reading and writing things for more rhetoric and composition oriented courses. Doing a PhD in language and literacy education and becoming firmly ensconced in the world of scholarly applied linguistics and English language teaching (even though, again, I primarily have taught writing across my career) has made me feel more acutely the gap between what I know about and what people who work in English departments know about. I went to MLA precisely one time, and even though there were people whose work I’ve read and who you could say are somewhat “in my field” there, overall I felt alienated and bemused. I will attend my first CCCC this year; I have a feeling I’ll feel a little more at home there, but not as much as I would at AAAL, TESOL, or (especially) SSLW. I commented at SSLW two years ago that identifying as a second language writing scholar actually makes me feel more confident about being able to fall in with various crews at different conferences. I don’t know if I feel equally at home in all the conferences I go to, but I could imagine continuing to rotate between, say, AAAL, TESOL, CCCC, and SSLW (with a side of IAWE) for some time without feeling too out of place. (The ability to do this is probably largely thanks to Paul Matsuda, who is active in all those organizations, as far as I know. Matsuda is probably an unconscious model for many young L2 writing scholars, his prolific output and late-night hours notwithstanding.)

2)    My location in Canada. I’m only now, after 6 years of PhDing at UBC and 1 1/2 years into my first job at a Canadian university, coming to terms with the blessing (not curse) of working on writing in the Canadian milieu. At first I was frustrated that in Canada there is not much of a tradition of “college writing” in the way there is in the US, and that scholarship from Canadian universities is rarely recognized by those in the US who teach writing to university students. However, as I start to take another look at US-based composition studies – which I remember thinking was remarkably myopic and US-focused, even when I was an MA student 10 years ago – I’m thankful that I can do “writing stuff” in Canada without getting mired in the kinds of political and cultural issues that US composition does. Not that they don’t do good or interesting work – many of them do – but many (not all) US comp teachers, when I encounter them at conferences, seem to have an interest in doing something that doesn't look all that much like the work I’ve been doing at Canadian universities for the last 8 years. That said, work on academic writing in Canada is – or can be – a small community under a big tent. There are people who do political and cultural studies work under this tent, and there are teachers of technical writing, and people who run writing centers, and applied linguistics, and so on. It’s my hope – through my recently begun co-editorship of the Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse& Writing/Redactologie—to bring as many people under this tent together as possible. I don’t know what this means for our relationship to US composition – and I’m reluctant to use a word like “our” there or to even suggest that I know what it would mean for “Canada” and “America” to have a “relationship” in this field – but I hope to be able to play some part in building a small but broad community of scholars who care about, among other things, writing in higher education.