Podcast appearances and mentions of stephen north

  Welcome to mere rhetoric. The podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren   The original recording of this podcast in 2014 was especially timely because we’re going to talk about an important article that came out in College English 30 years ago this year: Stephen North’s Idea of a Writing Center   This essay has been hugely influencial in the rapidly growin and professionalizing field of writing center studies. Back in 1984, though, writing centers couldn’t get no respect. “Writing Labs” of the early 20th century were often responses to a defitioncy model of writing education—the students who were coming in were seen as remedial, and thus in need of one-on-one attention from tutors. This was a response of the same crises we talked about in the podcast on the Harvard Reports. By the 80s, writing center were becoming more abundant on campuses, but that doesn’t mean they were popular: often shunted to the literal basements of buildings, with creaky, leaky facilities and an underpaid non-tenure track director, writing centers were somehow expected to “fix” student writing. But even under such terrible circumstances, writing center theory was beging to develop, aided by such scholars as Muriel Harris and Stephen North.   Stephen North was a good candidate to have written such a manifesto as “The Idea of a Writing Center.” In the 1980s, North was a discipline-maker. His thorough taxonomy of composition research The Making of Knowledge in Composition has sometimes been tapped as the foundational manifesto for research in composition. We’ll probably talk about it later, but “The Idea of a Writing Center” was no less of a manifesto for writing center studies.   The first line of the article reads “This is an essay that began out of frustration.” The frustration is palpable as North addresses some of the complaints that writing centers have from—and he means this in a nice way—ignorant colleagues. Everyone is ignorant—everyone in the profession, even people in composition, are ignorant “They do not understand what does happen, what can happen in a writing center” (32). It’s not just that North feels misunderstood; it’s that this misunderstanding affects the students who come through his door day-by-day: “You cannot parcel out some portion of a given student for us to deal with,” he fumes against his colleagues in writing classes, “’you take care of editing, I’ll deal with invention”) Nor should you require that all of your students drop by with an early draft of a research paper to get a reading from a fresh audience. You should not scrawl, at the bottom of a failing paper ‘go to the writing center.’ Even those of you who, out of genine concenrn, bring students to a writing center, almost by the hand, to make sure they know we won’t hurt them—even you are essentially out of line.” Ow. Seems like a pretty long list of ways to misuse the writing center and even to modern audiences all of these techniques seem innocent enough. The main problem, North points out, is that “we are not here to serve, supplement, back up, complement, reinforce, or otherwise be defined by any expernal curriculm. (40). Unless you think North has it out for his colleagues, he admits that even his own writing center includes in its mission statement the description of the center as “a tutorial facility for those with special problems in composition” (34). If it’s possible to spit something out in a written article, North faily spits the words out in self-loathing. And the loathing is “the idea that a writing center can only be some sort of skills center, a fix-it shop” (35). So if writing centers AREN’T just a support for composition, what is the “idea” of te writing center anyway? “We are here to talk to writers” (40). This definition makes the writing center an independent entity with its own purpose in the university, not just an appendage or fix-it shop for the composition classes. What a writing center is can be much larger. North sets out the definition for writing center that persists to this day : at a writing center “the object to to make sure that writer, not necessarily their texts, are what get changed by instruction. In axiom form it goes like this: our job is to produce better writers, not better writing” (38). Whhhoooo, I almost get chills. It’s a phrase you’ll hear a lot in writing cneters, “better writers, not better writing.” What it often means is that writing centers aren’t editing services or a way to improve an assignment or get an A in a class, but an educational cite themselves that hope to teach writing skills and processes that students can take with them in any class and even after graduation. In this sense, the writing center, as North says, “is going to be student-centers in the strictest sense of that term” (39). It will “being from where the student is, and move where the student moves” (39).     North suggests that writing centers are uniquely qualified to do this work, since the teaching of writing can take “place as much as possible during writing, during the acticity being learned” instead of before or after the writing (39). “The fact is,” North continues “not everyon’s interest in writing, their need or desire to write or learn to write coincides with the fifteen or thirty weeks they spend in writing courses—especially when, as is currently the case at so many institutions, those weeks are required” (42). Anyone who’s taught composition can attest that students sometimes have a hard time seeing the point of skills that their teachers immediately identify as critical for future writing, but with only the imperative of finishing the class, it can be hard for students to understand. At the writing center, North suggests, this is not the case, because the motivations become real. “Any given project” is the material that brings students in “that particular text, its success or failure” (38) motivates students. Students who are motivated by applying to law school or understanding a lab report are often suddenly willing to see the importance of writing skills. These students, “are suddenly willing—sometimes overwhelming so—to concern themselves with audience, purpose and persona and to revise over and over again” because “suddenly writing is a vehicle, a means to an end” (43).   The ideas from North’s “Idea of a writing center” have become commonplaces, both because they resonated with what was already happening in the Writing Lab Newsletter and other periodicals as , in North’s words, “writing center folk general are becoming more research-oriented” (44). That tradition has expanded, as peer-reviewed articles in writing centers studies supports a half-dozen journals as well as frequent publication in College English and College composition and communication. When North saw that writing center directors were meeting “as a recognized National Assembly” at the National Council of Teachers of English, he might have foreseen that writing center studies would balloon into the International Writing Center Association, a biennial conference that draws participants in hundreds, and all of the regional conferences affiliated with the IWCA…which reminds me. One such conference is the south cettral (waazzup?) writing center association conference, which we hosted here at the Uniersity of Texas at Austin last February. I confess that my interest in this topic was partially inspired by the call for papers in this conference, which invoked the 30-yr anniversary of “the idea of a Writing Center.”   If you have a conference that you’re organizing in rhetoric and composition, send me an email over at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com and I’d love to give you a shout out on a future podcast.        

Welcome Mere rhetoric a podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movements that have shaped the rhetorical world. Special thanks to the Samantha in the booth and the Humanities Media Project for the support I’m mary h and today we’re talking about Mina Shaughnessy’s book Error and Expectations   Errors and Expectations was published in 1977, but the story that led to it begins earlier, in the late 60s. After centuries of higher education being limited t the elite classes, universities began to open up. In fact, many universities, including Shaughnessy’s City College in New York, began open admissions. This meant that college education was now available to many people who had never before thought that they could attend college. This also meant that many of the new students were underprepared for college. This led to the development of what was called “basic writing”—what had previously been called “remedial writing.” Shaughnessey had to develop a program that would help the students to learn to write in ways that would enable success in all of their college classes. Quickly she discovered tht the students she taught weren’t writing like absolute novices or children, but that their writing had its own sort of logic based on the rules they thought they knew about writing. She found “BW students write the way they do, not because they are slow or non-verbal, indifferent to or incapable of academic excellence, but because they are beginners and must, like all beginners, learn by making mistakes “ But it wasn’t enough just to go off of a hunch. Shaughnessey compiled more than 4000 placement essays—the essays that determined whether students needed to be placed in basic writing—and searched for the patterns in them.   In this way, Shaughnessay was a pioneer in two fields: First off, she was among the first composition scholars to look at the characteristics of basic writers in more than a defitionency model. These students weren’t monkeys bashing away at typewriters when they wrote their essays, but their errors were informed by their expectations—what they thought was good writing. If certain rules or principles hadn’t been taught them, their errors would exhibit those patterns, but Shaughnessy broke away from the idea that some people just couldn’t write or couldn’t be taught how to write. She encouraged instructors to not worry about having to lay ground work but instead insisted ““Words, for the most part, must be learned in contexts, not before contexts” (217). She legitimized the study of basic writing and dignified basic writers within composition.   As she writes in her introduction “the territory I am calling basic writing and what others might call remedial or developmental writing” is still very much a frontier, unmapped, except for a scattering of impressionistic articles anda few blazed trails that individual teachers propose those their tests, and like the settlers of other frontiers, the teachers who by choice or assignment are heading to this pedagogical West are certain to be carrying many things they will no be needing, that will clog their journey as they get further on. So too they will discover the need of other things they do not have and will need to fabricate by mother wit out of what is at hand”   That kind of rough-and-ready development of a theory, is the other way that Shaughnessay influenced a developing field; she was among the first practitioner-scholars of composition. She taught basic writers for nine years and was intimately connected with these students’ experience, but she wasn’t content to thinking about improving the writing of just a handful of students in just her class. She found patterns in writing, began to classify and characterize these patterns and connected them to the available. When most of the understanding about basic writing was mired in what Stephen North would call “lore,” Shaughnessy was trying to find clear empirical ways of talking about student writing. This isn’t to say she was a pioneer in an ivory tower—each of her chapters gives suggestions to other practitioners and she talks about the importance of “Monday morning, into the life of the young man or woman sitting in a BW class,” where” our linguistic contemplations are likely to hover over a more immediate reality—namely the fact that a person who does not control the dominant code of literacy in a society that generated more writing than any society in history is likely to be pitched against more obstacles than are apparent to those who have already mastered that code” –in short, writing with errors hurts the lives of basic writers. For Shaughnessy, the access to this code was a matter of political and social justice, and was imperative to her age—and if you think about how we have entered a world of incessant texting, blogging, report writing, then you can imagine how important these questions of access are today. You can image these questions of access resonating with later scholars who care about questions of access like Lisa Delpit.   Although we now have many more studies about the patterns of Basic writing and how to educate basic writers, Shaughnessy remains a crucial figure for the discipline and this book Erros and Expectations, is now a classic of composition research.  

Wewlcome to Timelore Addendum a short stopgap to keep you going till the next epsidoe of Timelore.  In theis ep I and field agent Ant look at the Big Finish audio adventures that slot in and around the first series of dr Who and I interview Stephen North who played the father iin the family on The Christmas Carol, the latest Dr Who Christmas special.   hope you enjoy   David

Welcome to Episode 4 (It's really the third 'cause I don't count the Xmas episode!). This includes a story by myself, a poem by my cohost Elizabeth LaFond, and a short story by Stephen North! Also a huge announcement from KnightWatch Press!!!

Hey Ho Good Librarians and welcome to the continuation of the 100th Episode Blow Out! In this, Episode #100-E you'll begin to hear the podcast hitting it's stride. More full production stories, less Dr. Pus songs, more Laura Best songs, and just generally better production value. These are the one's I spent the most time on and I hope it shows. Here's what you get for free: 0:00 - "Kermit Intro" by DWM 0:24 - Stephen North's "Dead Tide" - "Mills" 10:17 - "When You Eat Brains" 12:44 - "What Happens Next" - DWM 23:46 - Bryan Hall message 24:42 - "The King In Red" by Nickie Rivers - "Lady Lazarus" 30:58 - "Kill Rob Best" - "Dr. Pus" 37:02 - "Empty Man" - TBE 40:45 - Rhiannon Frater's "As The World Dies: The First Days" - Chapter 1 51:53 - Laura Best - "99 Zombies" 55:43 - Uno Intro for #66 56:40 - "Timmy Poem" - ZombieFarmer 57:24 - "Black Friday" by Brad Zipprich 1:02:01 - "Grandmaw Got Infected By A Zombie" 1:05:27 - "T'was The Night Before Chrismas" by Dr. Pus 1:09:33 - "I Say Mommy Eating Santa Claus" 1:12:05 - Dave Dunwoody message 1:12:37 - "Deadman's Chest" by Nickie Rivers 1:17:45 - "Mr. Zed" 1:18:37 - Stephen North's "Dead Tide" - "Blake" 1:22:12 - Laura Best - "Human" 1:26:17 - "Bottoms Up Betsy" 1:37:15 - Manic Minute - "Mad" 1:38:15 - "Love In The Season Of Rot" by Eric S. Brown 1:43:32 - Tonia Brown message 1:44:05 - "Zombie Germs" by Shane in "Zombology" 1:58:26 - Laura Best - "Fever" I hope you enjoy the bits and pieces from the later episoded of "Library of the Living Dead Podcast". We're almost done. #100-F will also be available for download today. Undead Love, Doc Link to podcast: www.dr-pus.podomatic.com