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Pamela Childers' Plenary Address Discussions
July 17, 2006 - 06:57 — dcarpini@ycp.edu
At the 2006 WPA Conference in Chatanooga, in keeping with the conference themes, our three plenary speakers presented us with perspectives on the past of the organization, and provided us with an overview of some possible oppportunities to look out for in the future. In the third plenary, Pamela Childers outlined the reasons for extended collaboration between secondary and college writing teacher and administrators, and gave us many examples of how those collaborations might be sustained. I hope that those of you who were present for this plenary address will continue the discussions we began at the conference by adding to this forum your recollections and notes from the breakout groups, as well as your further thoughts about the issues raised in this plenary. I also hope that others, whether able to attend the conference or not, might help us to continue (and to archive) our discussion on the topics raised by Pamela's address.
- dcarpini@ycp.edu's blog
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Comments
Pam Childers' talk
Pam gave us an interesting overview of the challenges of HS-college collaborations. I was particularly interested in the comment that in some collaborations, the HS teachers feel used, as objects of study, and as if their opinions don't matter. She mentioned that I was one of the people who reported a successful collaboration to her. Some of my notes on this project are recorded at http://www.engl.niu.edu/mday/ncte04.html, the URL for a presentation I gave at NCTE in 2004. But looking back, I'm shocked at the fact that I didn't do an IRB application, or have participants sign more than a cursory informed consent form. After my more recent experiences with the campus IRB, if I did something like this again, I would probably have to jump through more hoops. But I wonder if I could do such a collaboration again, given all the difficulties.
The biggest problem with this collaboration, now, is in finding college teachers willing to take the time in class to have their students contact HS student and respond to their writing. We know it is valuable, but our Teacher Cert faculty are so overworked, and meeting the state standards and outcomes demand so much time that few teachers are able to spend time on collaborations like this one.
Michael Day
Notes from Breakout Discussion
Our group was very mindful of the challenges of collaboration, particularly, as one group member put it, the risk that college educators need to be wary of telling (or perceiving to be telling) their secondary colleagues what to do. With that and other challenges in mind (especially logistical ones), we tried to identify viable strategies for collaboration. These included the following:
• starting small to learn more about one another’s institutional cultures, possibly through some sort of national or regional exchange where teachers “shadow†one another for a day (possibly sponsored by WPA or regional affiliates) • developing relationships by working on projects that highlight common ground, such as pedagogical concerns (i.e. student engagement or lack thereof) • taking advantage of on-line forums for exchange, including those that might involve collaboration among secondary and college students, such as tutoring sites or collaboratively-authored websites geared toward students’ transitions from h.s. to college • seeking external funding and support for such exchanges • attaining buy-in from colleges and universities by articulating how collaborations relate to institutional missions (this step may also be significant in terms of faculty evaluation and recognition)
Understanding Secondary/ Post-Secondary Differences
I found Pam's list of some of the areas of differences between the contexts of secondary writing programs and post-secondary writing programs very generative. It seems obvious, but I had not thought much before about how the differences in our work schedules not only determines the available times for face-to-face collaboration, but also shapes our expectations about what and how much can be accomplished in a given amount of time.
Shirley
Shirley K Rose Purdue University President, Council of Writing Program Administrators
Secondary/Post-Secondary Differences, continued
Our group included a couple of folks who had taught high school--or who had decided not to teach high school--and the differences not only in the work schedule but also in the kinds of students were deciding factors in the kinds of work they ultimately chose to do. We also talked about some successful initiatives--Steve Wilhoit's institution, the University of Dayton, has been very successful in collaborating with the public school system to provide support for at-risk students.