The Classroom Situation

AIMS OF THE CHAPTER

This chapter views each class as an organized system of communications -
those you receive and those you create. Each statement you speak or write
in a course fits within a web of statements and can be shaped to be most ef­
fective for the situation. Seeing the classroom in this way will help you rec­
ognize the rhetorical situations the class presents.

KEY POINTS
1. Your writing in any class is part of the way you participate in its learn­
ing activities. Your writing will become more effective as you under­
stand the communication structure of the course.
2. College courses can be seen as communication systems in which the
teacher initiates reading assignments, lectures, and discussion ques­
tions and students respond in discussions and assignments. However,
each class is also a unique system that you must evaluate in order to
understand your own opportunities.

3. Although all students learn to get by in classrooms by trying to under­

stand what the teacher wants, you will gain more from defining your
own goals and activities.

4. Writing is open-ended, requiring you to frame your own goals and mo­
tives appropriate to the situation for which you are writing.

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT

• Have you ever written a paper or said something in a class that you felt
was "not yourself"? Have you ever not spoken up in class or not writ­
ten something because you felt those parts of yourself you would be ex-
Part One Writing Your Self into College 21

pressing would not be well received? Have you ever felt you had to si­
lence yourself to get by in a class? What made you feel that way? What
kinds of things would you have written or said if you were being more
honest to "your self"? What does being "yourself" in class really mean?
• Compare two classes, one where you felt involved and one where you
did not. What made for the difference?
• How do classrooms set up different situations for your writing? How
do you write differently in different classes?

Writing in any course, not just a writing class, joins together what you
bring with what the course and other people have to offer. Participating in
the unfolding discussions of a class challenges you to confront the new ideas,
information, and skills presented by your textbook, your teacher, and the
other students. As you address new intellectual challenges, learning becomes
an active search for useful and meaningful knowledge.
To participate in any class, you must obviously engage in certain activi­
ties, such as listening to the teacher reading the assignments, participating in
class discussions, writing papers of the assigned length, turning in assign­
ments on time, and taking exams. But what does it mean to do these things?
How do they fit together? How specifically should you do them? There are
many ways to listen, many ways to read, and many ways to write papers.
What do all these activities, moreover, add up for you, your goals, your in­
terests, and your commitments? How do all these activities come together
when you are on the spot to write a paper or exam essay?
To answer these questions you need to determine what is going on in the
classroom, what the teacher is asking you to do, and what kinds of responses
will be received well and rewarded. Then you need to line up the situation as
you see it with your own goals. Once you take this last step, the classroom
turns from a set of obligations into a set of opportunities.

Image removed for copyright reasons.

22 Chapter Two The Classroom Situation

®./cJ Sizing Up a Class Instead

of Psyching Out the Teacher
Sizing up a class and what you do in it is, at one level, easy. You have done it
all your life. Some teachers make it even easier by laying out exactly what is
expected of students. When the teacher does not explicitly tell students
exactly what to do, students have learned a classroom etiquette that, no mat-
ter how much minds may wander, keeps them in their seats doing the
teacher-identified task. Some students create active places for themselves by
aggressively seeking information from the teacher and maximizing their par-
ticipation. Other students take more passive roles, never testing the limits,
never seeking individual conferences, and rarely participating in discus-
sions. Still others are confrontational, looking for weaknesses in the teacher 's
position in order to rise in the esteem of classmates, who are amused at the
disruption of classroom power.
Whatever stance a student takes, however, the teacher takes a central
role in the classroom. Students always make choices by scrutinizing the
teacher 's expectations, demands, and behavior, even when the teacher en-
courages individualized student activity or reorganizes the class into peer
work groups. This control is exerted by assignments, grades, minute-by-
minute praise and correction, responses to different student behaviors, or
particular questions. Students, recognizing this fact, frequently talk of
"psyching out" the teacher- figuring out what's in the teacher's mind.
"Psyching out" a teacher, however, is not a very satisfactory way of deal-
ing with your own participation in the classroom, for it leaves your own
needs, motivations, and ideas out of the picture. To draw on all your re-
sources and to make the classroom as satisfying as it can be, you must put
yourself into the picture. Rather than "psyching out" the teacher, you must
"size up" the situation as an opportunity for your own participation. This is
often difficult for freshmen because of the many differences students find
among their college classes (see below).

~NEWS FROM THE FIELD

One Freshman's Struggle

I n a field study on the experience of college writers, Lucille Parkinson

McCarthy spent three semesters in three separate classes with Dave
Garrison, a beginning student at a private liberal arts college in the
Northeast. McCarthy conducted extensive interviews with Dave, his
peers, and his professors, and she attended classes w ith him and read all
drafts of his writing assignments. The three courses included in the study
were freshman English, poetry, and cell biology. McCarthy selected the
first two for their emphasis on writing, and the last because Dave was a bi-
ology major. The study gives us a revealing inside view of college writing
Part One Writing Your Self into College 23

that may remind you of what you are experiencing as you try to make
sense of the demands of your classes. Where those demands matched
Dave's own interests and needs,he did best.
McCarthy observed that Dave viewed each new writing situation as
something completely new and unfamiliar - even when the same skills
had been covered in previous courses. For example,even though the fresh­
man English course had covered summary writing, Dave saw the sum­
mary writing required by the biology class as fundamentally different than
anything he had ever done before.As a result,he felt lost.McCarthy com­
mented that students in introductory-level classes are often so over­
whelmed by the vocabulary and analytical style that they must learn for a
given discipline that they cannot access their own past experiences pro­
ductively - even when those past experiences would be helpful.
McCarthy also observed that Dave's success or failure in the classes
depended on how he valued the writing assignments. In both the fresh­
man English class and the biology class,Dave was able to identify a num­
ber of personal benefits he could get from the assignments. For example,
he saw the papers he wrote as helping him prepare both for a career and
for future college classes. Consequently, he was motivated and did well in
both classes. In the poetry class, however, Dave saw only one function of
the writing assignments: to demonstrate academic competence to his pro­
fessor.He received the lowest grades in this class.
McCarthy finally observed that Dave had to figure out on his own
what constituted an appropriate response to an assignment. He used six
different strategies for, as he put it, "figuring out what the teacher
wanted ": These six strategies were: (1) the teachers' comments about writ­
ing in class; (2) model texts provided by the teachers; (3) discussion with
other students; (4) teachers' written comments on earlier papers; (5) his
own previous experience; and (6) personal talks with teachers.
McCarthy's study led her to describe college students as "strangers in
strange lands." Each new class presents,not only a new subject matter,but
new ways of talking,reading,writing,and understanding the world.Stu­
dents often go from class to class unsure of what to expect and unable to
use the specialized language that each discipline demands of them. Ide­
ally, instructors should act as guides to the conventions and communica­
tion styles of the new discipline. However, they are often unable to
recognize - or unwilling to assist - students who are struggling with an
unfamiliar language.Ultimately, then,the responsibility for mastering the
rules of the "strange lands " falls to individual students. Dave recognized
this responsibility when, at the end of the 21-month study, he was asked
what advice he would give to an incoming freshman about college writing.
''I'd tell them," he said, "first you've got to figure out what your teachers
want. And then you've got to give it to them if you're gonna' get the
grade....And that's not always so easy."

From L. P. McCarthy," A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing Across the
Curriculum," Research in the Teaching of English 21 (1987) 233-35.
24 Chapter Two The Classroom Situation

When assigned writing in your courses, have you ever felt as Dave felt?
In what way? How did you deal with the situation? Did you follow simi-
lar strategies as Dave, or did you go down a different path? What was the
outcome? In retrospect, did you have any more effective options? Is there
anything the instructor might have done ·or said that would have made
the experience more useful or successful?

@/S Writing Is Open-Ended

As we have seen, an overly narrow focus on a teacher 's signals creates an ob-
stacle to self-motivated learning, the kind of learning that becomes increas-
ingly important at higher levels of education. When your choices are limited
to only how to respond to each question or direction presented by the
teacher, you never have to think about the underlying meaning of the activ-
ity or what you might gain from it. If you feel that all the serious decision
making of the classroom is totally in the teacher's hands, you never have to
take responsibility for your own education.
Writing, however, almost always involves taking responsibility. You
make your own statements in an open-ended situation. No one can say
ahead of time exactly what you should write, what you will think, or what
ideas you should express. To come up with something interesting, important,
and challenging to write, you must think about the meaning and possibilities
of the situation.
No matter how narrow a writing assignment appears, it contains many
possibilities of going beyond the minimal adequate response. Even assign-
ments that ask you to summarize a textbook give you options in phrasing, fo-
cus, detail, and depth of presentation. In the next few years you are likely to
run into assignments that ask you to frame original issues in a subject area,
draw on a range of sources, read widely on your own, seek new data from re-
search, provide novel analyses, and come up with new ideas and arguments.
The most open-ended work is often a major term project submitted as a
paper. Typically, as you advance in your subjects, more responsibility is put
upon you to develop ambitious papers that reflect more of your own choices
and judgment and rely on more of your own preliminary work, thought, and
research. In such major written assignments you decide how to develop the
topic, what skills and knowledges to draw on, how to organize your time
and activity, how to structure the work that lead s up to the completion of the
assignment, and what form your final presentation w ill take.
Your problem in open-ended tasks is to find a way to draw on your own
motivations, interests, skills, and resources to create something original.
Then you will have work you can feel committed to and involved in, that will
Part One Writing Your Self into College 25

show the teacher what you can do, that will extend your own learning in
ways that are important to you, and that you will be proud of.

@/c) Writing Your Self into College

As you find involving and motivating ways to take part in the activities of
your classes, you are more likely to elicit engaged responses from your in­
structors. They see you as potential professionals making original contribu­
tions to knowledge and the community. Generally, they look for and reward
those students who seem to have an original drive and personal commit­
ment. They notice students who show a knack for the subject or for address­
ing problems. They notice students who treat the course content not as
pre-packaged knowledge to be memorized, but as a complex area to be ex­
plored and become familiar with. When you really start talking with your
teachers about the ideas and problems posed by your courses, you will be in­
volved even more deeply.
Sometimes teachers describe at length ways to approach the novel prob­
lems posed by your assignments. At other times they may leave you to your
own devices, with only your experience to help you figure out what to do.
No matter how informative the instructor is about the expectations of the as­
signment, you must determine the kinds of resources and work that need to
go into the assignment and the kind of result you should aim at as your final
product. That is, figuring out the assignment is part of the assignment.
The way to figure out the assignment is not to search for obscure hints
about what is in the back of the teacher's mind, but to size up the organiza­
tion of the class and activities. Teachers often spend much time thinking
about what goes into a course, how it is structured, and what the students
ought to be doing. They are setting up an experience for you to take part in.
When you start to understand what they have set up, you can see more
clearly what kind of part you can play in it. You can then think about what
you might want to say in class and write in papers.
The remainder of this chapter focuses on understanding the dynamics of
communication within the classroom structure. It provides a general way of
looking at classrooms to see what kind of rhetorical situation you are in every
time you are asked to write. The next chapter will examine the social and per­
sonal processes through which you write your papers and make your state­
ments. Then the remainder of the book will examine in detail the typical
activity systems that occur in classes and the kinds of writing assignments
that fit within them.
26 Chapter Two The Classroom Situation

for 1. To help develop an understanding of the difference between psych-

ing out the teacher and sizing up a classroom, write two short infor-
Reflection mal pieces. First, in a few paragraphs describe an incident when you
or a classmate psyched out a teacher by determining what the teacher
was looking for and then by providing it. Second, describe in a few
paragraphs how a current class provides specific opportunities for
you to learn what you want to learn, grow in directions you wish to
grow in, or carry out a project you want to carry out. In class discus-
sion, compare your various experiences.
2. Write a short description of a time when you had to put up a false
front in writing or speaking for a course. Then describe another time
when you could really express who you were. Using those two exam-
ples, consider what you think "integrity" consists of and how it is rel-
evant or not to your education.

@.hJ Classrooms as Communication Systems

Most classrooms in college look bare. In elementary school the teacher would
d ecorate the room with seasonal signs and decorations, alphabets, and math
problems. In high school, class projects and papers, maps, and educational
posters might have given you something to look at. Once you step into most
college classrooms, however, there is little else to do but look at and listen to
the teacher and the other students.
It is communication that fills up the room for the hour and the many
hours that go into preparing for class. The communication is centered on
you, the student. Many messages are given for you to process: textbooks and
other assigned reading, lectures, blackboard writings, overhead transparen-
cies, electronic bulletin boards, questions and observations, assignment
sheets and exam papers. In tum, some communications are expected from
you : questions about your confusions, answers to questions posed by the
teacher, discussion, homework papers, term projects, and exam answers.
For the most part, the communications directed to you transmit what
you are supposed to learn, frame your assigned activities, and provoke you
into communicative action. The communications that come from you help
you put together what you have learned, develop your intellectual and criti-
cal skills, and show the teacher what you have learned. Most of the commu-
nications flow directly from the teacher (and teacher-assigned materials) to
you and from you back to the teacher. In some classes, however, information
flows as well from student to student - sometimes in ways set up and struc-
tured by the teachers, but sometimes in ways students arrange on their own.
Part One Writing Your Self into College 27

Some classes also send you out into the world to communicate with others -
perhaps through the books in the library, or through cooperative work expe­
riences or fieldwork research.
Each class is a communication system. Your learning is at the center of
each of these communicative systems. The writing assignments, in particu­
lar, are your most serious, formal, lasting, and well-thought-out contribu­
tions to the communication system in each class, and thus your most
important way of participating in the learning process in each class.

©/fJ The Communication Systems of Three Classes

As an example of communication systems, we might consider one course, In­
troduction to Psychology, taught at three neighboring colleges by different
professors with different philosophies about the course. All three courses use
the same textbook.
The first course, in a small liberal arts college, is taught in small discus­
sion sections. The overall aim is to help students learn to relate the concepts
and research of psychology to their own lives and to observe and reflect on
psychological processes in themselves and in others. The daily textbook
readings become the topic of class discussions about whether psychological
concepts fit with the students' experiences and observations, where the stu­
dents have seen these concepts in action, and how these concepts help clarify
or make more complex their view of human behavior. Assigned papers fol­
low directly from the connections made in class discussions. Students are ex­
pected to write about their own experiences and link them to the concepts
presented in lectures and textbooks. Instructors are likely to recognize and
reward deep application of concepts and discussions of their possible impli­
cations. They welcome bold thinking by the students, even if the ideas aren't
fully precise or supported.
At the second college, part of a large research university, introductory
psychology is taught in large lectures supplemented with a weekly small
meeting led by a graduate teaching assistant. The course introduces students
to the research and theory developed by research psychologists. The lectures
explain experiments that support the concepts in the chapter. A major dis­
tinction is made between everyday life and psychological research. Movies
supplement lectures to show what happens in controlled laboratory settings.
Weekly section meetings help clear up students' uncertainties about material
presented in the lectures and textbooks. Exams are a mixture of multiple­
choice questions and short essays, testing students' memory of theories and
research as presented in books and lectures. Several short essays are required
throughout the term asking students to compare how different theories
would address certain questions. In all instances students are discouraged
from bringing in their own experiences from the uncontrolled messy confu­
sion of life. On all assignments the instructor grading the work (usually the
teaching assistant) is looking for knowledge of the material, precision in the
28 Chapter Two The Classroom Situation

use of concepts, and awareness of the specialized nature of thinking in the

discipline.
The third introduction to psychology, at an engineering college with a
strong emphasis on computer science, emphasizes models of human cogni­
tion and how those models relate to models of computer thinking. Students
are given puzzles as to what a certain theory would mean about behavior, or
how a behavior could be modeled in a robotics or artificial intelligence sys­
tem. Included in the readings are descriptions of cognitive models of human
behavior and artificial intelligence projects. As in the research university,
classes are taught primarily in large lectures, but the weekly section meetings
taught by graduate students are run as workshops where students are asked
to look into their own mental operations and describe what they are doing.
They are also asked to consider the logic by which computer programs work
and to think of hypothetical automated systems. Writing assignments tend to
be either highly speculative in terms of how various processes might be
modeled or quite concrete in describing a possible artificial intelligence pro­
ject. Exams consist of puzzles of human or machine behavior that are to be
analyzed in terms of the models studied. On exams and essays teachers like
ingenious solutions, plausible but unproven suggestions, hypothetical mod­
els, and concrete applications.
In these three cases the instructors have different views of their subject -
psychology - and the uses to be made of it. Each instructor builds those
views into a structured set of activities that present and apply the subject
knowledge. We can even think of the three classes as three different dramas
where students play different roles and learn different things (see Burke's
dramatism, page 29). The student learning psychology would have a differ­
ent experience depending on which institution and class he or she was in;
nonetheless, in each case the student can rapidly become oriented by paying
attention to the pattern of communicative activity in each of the settings. Par­
ticipating in the small personal-experience course is different than partici­
pating in the large lecture or computer science courses.
Even without such extreme variants, however, differences among
courses are not simply random, but rather reflect differences in faculty, de­
partments, and colleges. In finding out these differences, you will see that
each course makes a kind of sense, and you can get the most out of each if
you understand that sense.
The typical parts of classroom communication systems are already fa­
miliar to you, although you may not have thought about them in this way.
There are the elements brought into the classroom by the teacher and by you,
there are the elements spontaneously created in the classroom interaction,
and then there are those generated in response to formal requirements - the
demands put upon you to say or write various sorts of things. This last is
what puts the most pressure on you, what may most worry you, and what
this book is aimed to help with. But this last must be understood in relation
to the other parts and how they are held together in the teacher's structuring
of events and activities. These elements all set the stage for your major pro­
ductions. They all define the spot you are put on when you are given a writ­
ing assignment.
Part One Writing Your Self into College 29

riting for 1. Following the example of the descriptions of psychology courses on

pages 27-28, describe a class you are taking now as a communication
Reflection system. Discuss such things as what you expect to get from the
course, how you believe the knowledge will be useful for you, how
the professor thinks the knowledge will be useful, what actually ap-
pears to be offered in the class, and how the class is structured com-
municatively. What kinds of communications will you receive, from
whom, and what kinds of communications will you produce, for
whom and with what purpose? Then in class discussion compare the
different communication systems of the courses you and your class-
mates are taking.
2. Imagine an alternative version of the course you described in answer
1, set in a different kind of college and based on different goals. De-
scribe the communication structure and activities of this hypothetical
course. Then consider whether this alternative course might be more
or less to your liking than the version you are taking.

@./C) USEFUL CONCEPTS FROM RHETORIC

Dramatism

I n his book A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke, one of the pioneers of

twentieth-century rhetorical theory, outlined a model that can be used
to tell what is happening in communication. Burke thought that acts of
communication could be best understood when compared to the actions in
a stage play. To understand the dialogue in a play, we must interpret the
lines in their dramatic context, taking into account such factors as the type
of play that it is, the actions of the other characters, the way that the play is
staged, and the time and place of the action. Similarly, Burke argued, we
should try to study communication between people by considering all the
elements of the human drama in which the communication is situated.
Thus he developed the theory of dramatism, which identified five dra-
matic components that appear in any human communication:
1. The act is the actual text of the communication. It is not limited to
written or spoken words. Burke defines communication broadly and
insists that gestures and actions, and even silences and omissions,
contain a rhetorical purpose and are therefore "communications."
2. The agent refers to the person, people, or institutions who perform.
In a play, the agents would be the actors themselves. In a commu-
nicative situation, the agents are the people who initiate, or are other-
wise involved in, the communication.
30 Chapter Two The Classroom Situation

The pentad of Image removed for copyright reasons.

Kenneth Burke's
dramatism is
illustrated in the
public briefing (act)
delivered by General
Norman Schwarzkopf
(agent). Through
maps, printed and
spoken words,
gestures, dress, and
fiags (agency) he
explains, justifies,
and maintains
support for U.S.
actions (purpose) to
the press and
through them to the
American public
during Operation
Desert Shield in the
Gulf War (setting).

3. The scene consists of all the background information that sets the
stage for the communicative act. Scenic considerations include the
physical locality as well as the social, cultural, economic, philosophi­
cal, or religious values that shape the way that communication occurs
in a particular context.
4. The agency deals with how the act is accomplished by the agent. All
of the tools of rhetoric and communication, all of the various skills of
writing, speaking, debating, and denouncing, are part of what Burke
labeled "agency."
5. The purpose refers to the reason for the communication. Although it
isn't always possible to determine exactly what someone's motives
may be, there are always purposes - some stated and some ob­
scured - for every kind of speech act. Analyzing these purposes is
an essential part of understanding the communication.
Part One Writing Your Self into College 31

Burke called these five terms, taken together, the pentad and devoted
most of his book to showing how the various relationships and ratios be­
tween these five items can explain much of the history of Western philoso­
phy and rhetoric. Each of the parts of the pentad influences each of the
others in a reciprocal fashion. If we change something about the scene of a
communication, for example, then we will automatically change the act
and the agents; in doing so, we also alter the agencies and the purpose. To
illustrate the way that Burke's pentad works in rhetorical analysis, con­
sider the following drama of communication:
An elderly male professor (an agent) is giving a lecture on the
poetry of Keats (an act). The professor is employed by a small,
private, prestigious liberal arts college on the East Coast that
caters primarily to upper-class students (a scene). The professor
has a strong belief that poetry is its own reward, and he refuses
to lecture on Keats's life or attempt to explain the poetry. He be­
lieves, instead, that, if he reads the poems with enough feeling
and emphasis (the agency), the students will see how beautiful
poetry can actually be. In this way, he hopes to instill in his stu­
dents the same love of the great masters that he has always felt (a
purpose).
If any one of these factors were different, the entire drama would
change. The age, gender, status, and personal philosophy of the agent af­
fect the entire drama. If the teacher were a young woman, or a graduate
student, or a Keats hater, then everything about the lesson would change.
Likewise, if the scene were an understaffed, poorly funded urban city col­
lege or a large state university, the teacher would have to do things much
differently. To analyze what is happening in this communication, we must
take into account all of the relevant factors and the way that they affect
each other.
Dramatism provides a series of questions that takes us beyond the
written or spoken text of a given conversation. The meaning of a word de­
pends, to a very large degree, on the context in which it is used, and the el­
ements of the pentad help us see all of the factors that go into creating that
context. The five parts of the pentad were designed to answer five key
questions about any rhetorical instance: who, what, where, why, and how.
For Kenneth Burke, as for many contemporary students of rhetoric, these
factors represent the minimum amount of information that must be known
for any communication to make sense.

From Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
32 Chapter Two The Classroom Situation

@./c) The Teacher's Role in Classroom

Communications
Some of the most visible communications in the classroom system are those
defined by the teacher - from assigned readings, to lectures, to handouts of
statistics. The readings - frequently from textbooks, but also from other
books and articles - are usually done before the class. Instructors some­
times prepare you by providing background or by focusing your attention on
certain issues. Lectures and discussions also sometimes review material you
have just read to help you see how it fits into the themes the professor is
stressing. However, no matter how much support the professor gives you for
the reading, it is up to you to understand the reading and fit it into the puz­
zle of the course.

@./c) Textbooks
Textbooks are of various types. Some set out large bodies of information or­
ganized in an appropriate way, making connections among the various facts
and ideas - such as history textbooks. Others introduce you to a range of
theories, approaches, and research findings that make up the developments
of a field - such as sociology textbooks. Still others identify various topics
studied in the field and explain the research and concepts the field has de­
veloped to help you understand them - some experimental psychology
textbooks do this. Some textbooks focus on different areas of practice or
problems you will need to understand in professional work. Examples
would be textbooks in nursing or management. Still others, such as mathe­
matics or physics textbooks, introduce you to a set of skills and concepts that
you will learn to manipulate through a set of sequenced exercises and prob­
lems. But all of these books are written for you, the college students taking
the courses, and they provide sequences of learning appropriate to the sub­
ject.
Teachers may use the textbook as the framework of the course, working
through the book chapter by chapter with explanations and discussions of
the material followed by assignment of problem sets, exercises, and activities
from the end of each chapter. For such textbook-driven courses it is espe­
cially important to see the position the textbook puts you in, how in a sense
the textbook surrounds you in order to direct and support certain activities
on your part. Other instructors may have the classes and lectures run paral­
lel, but not overlap, with the readings, providing an alternate view or a sec­
ond way into the subject. Still other instructors leave the textbooks far
behind, having students use the books just as background reading or as a ref­
erence resource.
Although teachers use textbooks in different ways in the lectures, dis­
cussions, and assignments, it is also worth understanding the structure of
Part One Writing Your Self into College 33

each textbook you are assigned, the kind of information it delivers, the se­
quence and development of materials, and what the textbook expects stu­
dents to learn and be able to do. Since teachers or departments usually
choose textbooks that fit their conception of the courses and that will help
students fulfill those expectations, orienting yourself to the textbook will ori­
ent you to the assumptions and expectations of the course.

•ting for 1. Describe and compare two textbooks you are currently assigned in
two different courses. What kind of information does each textbook
Reflection provide, in how much detail? What kinds of concepts are explained,
and what are you expected to do with them? What kinds of skills or
instructions are explained? What kinds of questions, problems, and
activities does the book provide? How is each book related to the
aims of each course?
2. After asking permission, observe a roommate or friend preparing a
textbook assignment for a subject in which you have not taken a
course. First ask the friend about the course and ask to look over the
book for a few minutes. Then watch and take notes as your friend be­
gins to study. Does he or she read straight through, skip around, or
refer back to earlier sections? What parts does he or she take more or
less time on? Does your friend take notes, underline, or highlight?
Does he or she answer questions or solve problems, and how does
the material of the book help in those activities? Then write a few
paragraphs describing what you observed and your thoughts about
how work with the textbook fits into the learning of the course.

©.AJ Other Readings and Resources

Assigned readings in college often come from a wide variety of sources be­
yond the textbook. They might be newspaper articles, popular books, eco­
nomic reports, selections from specialized professional journals, or any kind
of text written for any audience. Instructors may have many different rea­
sons for including such materials and may ask you to use them in different
ways.
Clippings from newspapers and general circulation magazines may be
assigned as supplements to textbooks, to provide late-breaking develop­
ments in a field, or to explain specialized concepts. Current materials could
also be assigned to provide examples of how the concepts of the course, such
as Economics, work their way into daily life. Articles may also provide a case
study - for example, in the political process - that you will be expected to
34 Chapter Two The Classroom Situation

examine using the concepts and methods you have been learning. You might
be asked to compare how the press treats issues with the more specialized,
professional perspective you are obtaining in the course. For example, you
may be asked to describe how issues of discrimination are portrayed in the
popular media. If you keep in mind both the source of the articles and why
they are made part of the course, you will know what kinds of attention to
give to them.
Similarly, articles from the professional literature in a discipline are fre­
quently used in college courses. Sometimes teachers use these to present the
most current and advanced thinking and research in the area. Instructors
may also want you to become familiar with how new findings are communi­
cated using the specialized language, reasoning, and methods of the field. In
that case you need to pay attention to how the arguments are built as well as
the ideas and information presented. If the teacher wants you to become
aware of the different approaches and debates in the field, you need to con­
trast articles, positions, and evidence with each other. Finally, the teacher
may want you to learn to question the validity of some arguments and meth­
ods, and so you will need to evaluate the articles. As you advance in your
fields, you will be asked to take more complex stands toward what you read.
In addition to newspaper and journal articles, you may be asked to read
books written for different audiences. Some may provide specialized infor­
mation (such as histories or presentations of the latest theories in science),
but others may raise large issues that are of general public interest (as in
books arguing for a new educational policy). You may be asked to engage in
discussion with these texts, criticize the approaches they take, examine their
role in the formation of public attitudes, or (as in literature or philosophy
classes) interpret, analyze, place in context, and theorize about them.
Teachers may also bring in many other communications, from outside
speakers to films and videos to computer programs. Some may be required;
others may be supplementary or recommended, kept on library reserve, or in
an audiovisual resource room; and still others may be only mentioned in a
bibliography handed out for you to consult as you become interested in a
topic or develop a term project.

©AJ Interacting with the Written Material

Each of the readings or other materials presented in a class was written for a
specific audience at a specific time with particular purposes. In a way the text
asks you to take on the role of that original reader. A French political editor­
ial from the eighteenth century asks you to take sides on an issue of French
politics of the period, even though the dispute is long dead and from another
country; a comic strip, even if it is from a World War II GI newspaper, aims to
make you laugh; and a classic essay in Renaissance science still aims to per­
suade you of its truth, even though the science has since moved on. Even if
you know enough about French politics or the situation of Gls or Renais-
Part One Writing Your Self into College 35

sance science to understand the issues, you may no longer find the politics
acceptable, the science convincing, or the joke funny. From the perspective of
the original reader, you may not find the old texts interesting or useful. Even
if you did, you still may not be getting from them what the instructor hoped
for by making the assignment. These texts become useful, relevant, and in-
teresting for the course only when taken from a special perspective that ties
them into the work and thinking of the course, such as understanding the vi-
olence of emotion that overtook the French Revolution, the role of humor in
American culture to mediate between beliefs in individualism and the com-
pulsions of military life, and the changes in scientific thinking over time.
Only with textbooks (and a few other materials used in a similar direct
instructional way) are you clearly in the position of the primary user and can
take a natural attitude of a reader, following the cues and directions the au-
thor sets for you. Even with textbooks, as we have discussed, it helps to re-
flect on what the text asks you to do and how. With all other readings you
need to be even more reflective, asking yourself what the text attempted to
do for original readers, how the teacher is asking you to read it, and what the
reading adds to the total learning of the course.
Teachers frequently give some explanation and justification for the vari-
ous readings and other materials, perhaps on the first day of the course in go-
ing over the syllabus. It is easy to overlook this beginning-of-the-term
information if you are focused more on how many pages you will have to
read and write. Sometimes teachers may give a sentence or two of explana-
tion at the end of a class meeting to prepare you for the next reading. Again,
it is easy to ignore such orientations as you are packing your books and rush-
ing to your next class. You will gain much, however, by paying attention to
such clues about how the teacher uses these resources in class and about
what questions you will be asked about them. If you have any doubt about
why you are assigned any reading or other material, what kind of attention
you are supposed to give it, or what you are supposed to get from it, just ask
the instructor.

Describe a recent instance when a teacher assigned nontextbook reading

for one of your courses. What was the course? What was the material?
What was the source? What was the original purpose of the material? For
what purpose did the teacher assign it? What attitude or perspective did
you need to have to the material to relate it to class activities? How did
your role of reader differ from the role of the original readers? Given the
difference in your perspective, what things did you see or understand
about the text that might not have been evident to the original readers?
36 Chapter Two The Classroom Situation

©./cJ How the Instructor Shapes

What Happens in Class
In addition to setting materials for you to read or otherwise use, the instruc­
tor determines the plan for each day's class. If the instructor fills class hours
with lectures, films, or other spectator events, your success lies in figuring
out when and how to engage actively with the material. Alternatively, if the
instructor structures the class around student participation, your success lies
in participating most fully. In either case much is determined by what the
teacher brings to the class, how he or she structures the class, and how he or
she prompts student activity.

Lectures and Active Listening

Although lectures seem to hand authority totally over to the lecturer for the
hour, really they call upon all your resources to be an active listener. Lectures
can do many things:
• Deliver information
• Provide understandable explanations of difficult concepts
• Lead through a sequence of related information and ideas to build a
sense of connections
• Apply concepts of the course to situations of interest or concern
• Explain procedures
• Provide examples and models of tasks that will be assigned
• Define the teacher's expectations

The college classroom Image removed for copyright reasons.

is a complex
communicative system
where students'
comments respond to
textbooks, other
readings, films, lectures,
questions, and
discussion in order to
communicate with
classmates and the
instructor.
Part One Writing Your Self into College 37

• Provide provocative arguments to get reactions from the students

• Be enriched by handouts, overheads, slides, or films
Each of these tasks and techniques requires different kinds of listening, pro-
cessing, and thinking. Lectures are not undifferentiated information to be
memorized, but rather complex resources and prods for activity.
Lectures are central to most courses; they identify what the teacher
thinks is important and what the teacher thinks the student ought to be
learning and doing. Making some record of the lecture, therefore, is essential.
Whether you should take notes or record lectures, and in what format, is a
personal decision based on your sense of the course and your own sense of
how you work best. Everyone has his or her own style of organizing
thoughts, remembering information, and taking notes. Each course has its
own demands and its own relation to material in the lectures.
However, note taking has the unfortunate effect of putting the student in
the position of a passive receiver of authoritative words, concerned with
transcribing rather than responding or thinking about the words. When you
come to study your notes, you may be simply tempted to memorize the lec-
tures rather than working them into your own way of thinking.
Depending on how the lecture relates to what is in the textbook, how
well you know the material, and how your own memory works, you may
also use your notebook for your own thoughts about the lecture as it hap-
pens, for questions, or just for the major ideas covered. To encourage stu-
dents to think about what is being said, lecturers sometimes provide their
own set of notes, or notes may be available from a student service. There is
nothing wrong with using prepared notes if you use them to free yourself to
really listen and think about the lecture. If you find that you do want to
spend the lecture taking notes, you can use the few minutes after the lecture,
perhaps walking to the next class, to reflect about what went on and how it
relates to the overall development of the course. Step out of the maze of the
lecturers' words to encounter your own thoughts and reactions.

for Closely observe a lecture you are required to attend for one of your
classes. Take notes on the style of delivery and presentation. Does the lec-
Reflection turer use anecdotes, charts, slides, videos? Is the material formally orga-
nized around an obvious outline, or does it seem to follow a flow of
ideas? Is it delivered from notes, a prepared text, or apparently sponta-
neously? What kind of information is provided? What do you think you
were supposed to get out of it? What kinds of things are you supposed to
be able to do as a result of hearing the lecture?
Describe what you found and your thoughts about the lecture in sev-
eral paragraphs.
38 Chapter Two The Classroom Situation

Discussion
Discussion, as opposed to lecture, gives you moment-by-moment clues on
what you ought to be thinking about. Teachers are constantly providing
prompts for you to think about, posing problems, or asking questions. Each
of these prompts defines an activity in which you can engage. Usually teach­
ers expect that you will prepare assigned materials, readings, and exercises
before the class meeting so that the prompts can build on this material. The
questions may also call on other material you may have studied or skills de­
veloped in a previous class. If there is something about the questions that
you don't understand, or if you don't understand where other students'
replies are coming from, you can always ask the teacher to explain what he
or she is looking for and what kind of knowledge would help in providing an
answer.
Where and how the teacher guides the class discussion are particularly
revealing about what the teacher thinks is important and what you ought to
be able to do with the material. Some teachers may be open to taking discus­
sions in directions that reflect your interests and concerns, whereas others
may be more resistant. By staying tuned to teachers' questioning, you can see
what skills, ideas, and assumptions the teacher relies on and note character­
istic patterns or interests that develop over the term.
More deeply than simply providing clues to teacher expectations, these
questions and other discussion-leading devices establish the immediate
framework for your activity. The teacher's questions are like scaffolds within
which you can construct your answers. By asking particular kinds of ques­
tions, the teacher prompts you to think about particular kinds of things. If the
teacher asks you to locate where a character in a story first shows uncertainty
about his beliefs, that question focuses your attention on what the character
believes and then sets you to searching through the story for phrases that in­
dicate uncertainty. That search through the story helps you build a view of
the changing beliefs of the character.
Through many such techniques, teachers focus your attention on specific
kinds of information and thoughts, helping you develop your skills and
ideas. How the teacher arranges the seating in the class, whether the teacher
establishes group activities and in what ways, at what point in each class the
teacher shifts back and forth from lecture to discussion, whether there is a lab
attached to the course and what activities are scheduled for those periods,
what kinds of explicit instructions, advice, or rules govern activities - all
these things and others shape how you participate in the classroom and thus
what information, ideas, and skills you learn as a participant. By seeing more
clearly the activities the teacher is asking you to participate in, you can see
how you can extend yourself to new learning.
Part One Writing Your Self into College 39

In the next discussion section of another class, write down the questions
and other prompts used by the teacher to get students to talk. What do
you think the teacher is looking to get from the students? What is his or
her strategy? Also describe how the students respond to the various
prompts. How did they get a sense of what the teacher was looking for?
How did different students respond? To which responses did the teacher
react most favorably? Which responses did you like best? Least? To what
extent did students fulfill what the teacher was hoping for, and to what
extent did they go in different directions? How did the teacher deal with
the new directions? Describe in several paragraphs what you found.

©AJ The Student's Role in Classroom

Communications
While the teacher may provide information and frames classroom activity, all
classroom communication ultimately sets the stage for your participation,
what you communicate. Some of your communications will help teachers
evaluate your work, such as the papers, tests, and class presentations that
will be graded. Whether these will be formally graded or not, they are con-
stant indicators of your participation, involvement, and learning, to which
the teacher can respond. More than that, however, your communicative ac-
tivities are what you learn. You learn to solve certain kinds of puzzles, answer
certain kinds of questions, produce certain facts and concepts in particular
circumstances, and develop and articulate certain kinds of thoughts. While
you may remember a certain amount of information that you may passively
listen to, the more you actively use what you have heard to carry out mean-
ingful tasks, the more you will remember, and the more you will be able to
apply that learning when you need it. How you understand what is being
asked from you (see Task Representation, page 40) will shape what you do.
In developing your own communications you are involved with knowl-
edge and ideas, trying to shape them in ways that meet the standards and in-
terests of the class.
Especially in more extended and open-ended projects, you focus your at-
tention and knowledge for a substantial period of time in order to build
structures of thought around the subject matter and materials of the course.
In this way you draw on all the communications that have occurred previ-
ously in class, whether from the textbook, discussions, lectures, lab activities,
or extensions of classrooms through assigned library projects or field work.
You fit together what has come before to extend it in a way appropriate to the
assignment. In other words, you incorporate the entire communication sys-
40 Chapter Two The Classroom Situation

tern of the class in the process of creating your own communication. Those
patterns then become part of you, always available for you to use in later
courses and after you graduate.

@./C) REVIEWING WRITING PROCESSES

Task Representation

S uccess or failure in college may depend, not on how well you com-
pose sentences or organize ideas, but on how accurately you inter-
pret your writing assignments. In an experimental study on task
representation, Linda Flower, a composition researcher at Carnegie Mellon
University, has determined that, even when given the same assignment,
students may devise very different strategies for organizing information
and presenting ideas.
Flower began her experiment by having a group of students read a se-
ries of comments and opinions about revising papers. The students were
given a typically open-ended assignment to "make a brief (1- to 2-page)
comprehensive statement about the process of revision in writing." How-
ever, instead of composing the paper as they normally would, students
were instructed to think out loud while they were writing.
By examining what the students said as they wrote and comparing
that to what they wrote, Flower d etermined that the students chose from
five general strategies for responding to the assignment, depending on
how they represented the task to themselves:
1. Summary. Some students approached the assignment as a summary.
They read the information carefully, selected what they considered to
be the most important ideas from each paragraph, and wrote a paper
highlighting and explaining these main points.
2. Response. Other students used the assignment as a springboard for
their own responses. Students w ho wrote response-type papers gen-
erally searched the text of the assignment for some point or key
phrase that they could use as a reference point for their own experi-
ences or opinions. Often the finished papers were only tangentially
related to the text of the assignment.
3. Review and comment. Another group of students settled on a combina-
tion of summary and response. These students would either summa-
rize a point briefly and then add their own response to it, or they
would summarize in the first part of their paper and then add an
"opinion paragraph" at the end.
4. Synthesis. A fourth group of students attempted to create a structure
that connected the various statements about revision into a single
controlling thesis. These students went well beyond the requirements
of a summary by creating a concept Flower describes as "a substan-
Part One Writing Your Self into College 41

tive, informative idea rather than an immediately obvious inference."

5. Interpretation for a rhetorical purpose. A final group of students wrote
papers that were designed to set up an issue or argue a point. They
interpreted the information as either supporting or refuting a general
proposition about the nature of writing or revision. These students
interpreted the assignment as an invitation to make or explore a con­
troversial issue, and they organized the information accordingly.
None of these responses could be considered right or wrong, since the
assignment did not give the students enough information to choose
among the strategies. All five strategies represent valid types of academic
writing. Many teachers give similarly open-ended assignments even
though they expect students to employ (or to avoid) specific strategies. In
such cases, the student has to determine the best way to organize the pa­
per and process the information. If you have the chance to ask your teacher
whether your representation of the task matches the teacher's expecta­
tions, you can approach the assignment with greater confidence.

Flower, Linda et al. Reading to Write: Exploring a Cognitive and Social Process. Oxford UP
1990.

©AJ Being on the Spot

When you recognize a moment when you must say or write something, you
may feel on the spot. You are in what is called a rhetorical situation (see page
42). In class you may place yourself on that rhetorical spot by raising your
hand in a discussion, or the teacher may place you in it by assigning a paper,
but in both cases the next move is yours. You feel pressure to respond, to
make a statement. What do you say? What do you write?
What you say or write, however, does not need to come out of the blue.
The more attention you pay to the situation, the more clues you will have to

Image removed for copyright reasons.

42 Chapter Two The Classroom Situation

find both what will fit the situation and what you want to say in it. For ex-
ample, usually a major paper is preceded by many smaller events, such as
class discussions, meetings with your professor to talk over your planned
project, perhaps smaller pieces of assigned writing, or after-class discussions
with classmates. These less demanding events prepare you for the bigger
statements.
The school term is a series of activities developing your skill with the ma-
terial and your relationship with those around you in the class. The big mo-
ments are only later points in a process of development. Teachers who are
aware of this process create a sequence of activities that lead to more ambi-
tious writing projects at the end of the term. Sometimes, however, you have
to leap from a series of small-scale, limited activities, like taking notes in a
lecture, to a single complex performance, as in a major analytical paper.
When you are suddenly on that very big and unprepared spot, you have to
build that bridge from daily activity to the larger, more independent re-
sponse.
Over your education, these moments add up. Over your college career
you will write many papers, each one an experience that prepares you for the
next. If all goes well, by your senior year you will be writing at an entirely
different level. Looking back then at the papers you wrote over your college
years, you may be amazed at how far your thinking, knowledge, and ability
to write effectively about difficult subjects have come.

@/C) USEFUL CONCEPTS FROM RHETORIC

The Rhetorical Situation and Rhetorical Timing

A rhetorical situation is a situation that appears to ask you to make a

statement. It is defined both by other people, in what they are say-
ing and doing, and by your own motivations. For example, your
friends may be discussing where to go for a snack, but since you have to
run off to a class in a few minutes, you have no stake in the discussion. So
this is not a rhetorical situation for you. However, another friend passes
you and says that class has been canceled. Suddenly you have reason to
urge the group to choose your favorite coffee bar; the situation is now a
rhetorical one for you. But before you can speak, they have already agreed
to go there, so the rhetorical situation has evaporated. All you have to say
is, real coolly, "Whatever."
Rhetorical timing has to do with the right moment to make your state-
ment. You may be in a situation w here you have som ething very important
to say, but if you blurt it out at the wron g moment, p eople won't listen,
may react negatively, or may not understand what you are talking about.
As you listen to your friend who is depressed over a bad grade in a frus-
trating class, you may be aware that the situation calls for you to oppose
her plan to drop out of college. On the other hand, you realize that this is
Part One Writing Your Self into College 43

not the right moment to tell her how much she is getting from the experi-
ence. Instead it may be the right moment to help her figure out just what is
so frustrating about this class. Later, once she can start to see the bigger
picture again, may be a better moment to encourage her to stay in school.
Much of the art of rhetoric is in recognizing those situations in which
making a statement will have some useful effect, being able to perceive
what is going on, identifying your own stakes or interest in influencing the
situation, and choosing the right time to make your statement most effec-
tively. Since situations often change moment by moment, those people
who recognize the opportunities of the moment and are ready to act
rhetorically can make themselves heard and can accomplish things that
would be impossible at other times and places.
Of course, the situation and timing of college writing is often set by the
teacher through the assignment and the deadline. Still, understanding the
situation of the classroom, your own interests, and exactly where the as-
signment fits in the unfolding of the course over time will help you write
more appropriately for that moment in that course.

Describe one situation in which you were assigned to write something to

be read by the instructor or the class. How did the assignment depend on
Reflection reading assignments, class lectures and discussions, or other previous
communications? When was the assignment due, and how did that affect
what was expected and what you were able to accomplish? How detailed
was the teacher in defining the assignment and in setting specific goals
and expectations? Were there specific class or group activities to help you
write the paper, such as brainstorming or editing sessions? How did your
own interests and knowledge influence what you chose to write and the
approach you took? How did you expect the teacher would respond to
your paper, and were you surprised by the actual response? In retrospect,
would you have approached the assignment any differently?

Find out how to log on to the World Wide Web. Visit the home page of
your college. (Your instructor will provide you the URL address.) See
what kind of information your college makes available and what kind of
image it presents to the world. Write a few paragraphs describing how
your college represents itself.