Process of Interpretation

While preparing my lesson plan for this week, I came across a quote in Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation describing John Lennon's first week at the art college in Liverpool. His tutor, Alfred Bollard, was an unconventional teacher who actually had no interest in formal lectures and held most of his lectures in Ye Cracke, a pub on Rice Street. Despite his unconventional methods, Bollard saw Lennon as a slacker; he never contributed to the discussion, didn't share his work and had the attitude of an "ill-at-ease Teddy Boy."

However, Bollard's opinion of young John Lennon changed greatly after finding the future Beatle's notebook in the pub. "Then one day in the lecture room I found this notebook full of caricatures - of myself, the other tutor's, the students - all done with descriptions and verse, and it was the wittiest thing I'd ever seen in my life. There was no name on it. It took me quite a while to find out that Lennon had done it.

"The next time student work was being put up and discussed, I brought out this notebook and held it up and we discussed the work in it. John had never expected anyone to look at it, let alone find it funny and brilliant. Afterward I told him, 'When I talk about interpretation, boy, this is the kind of thing I mean as well. This is the kind of thing I want you to be doing.'" (Norman, 41)

Teachers of first-year college students have a responsibility to educate their students in the principles of collegiate writing. But one thing that is often overlooked is the importance of allowing interpretation in the classroom.

In Wardle and Downs' followup to Writing About Writing, revised in 2012, the authors reiterate their reasoning which prompted their 2007 article Writing About Writing (WAW):

First-year writing should seek to "improve students' understanding of writing, rhetoric, language, and literacy in a course that is topically oriented to reading and writing as scholarly inquiry and encouraging more realistic understandings of writing" (553). Although we clarified, not very vigorously, that "there are a number of ways to institute" such a course (559), we described a particular way that we had been teaching to this purpose at the time with sufficient emphasis to drown out that ecumenical encouragement."

The first-year experience, or freshman seminar, is one of these different ways to introduce college students to the levels of writing, rhetoric, etc. expected by their university. It is also a form of interpretation, much like what Bollard expressed to Lennon when he told him, "This is the kind of thing I want you to be doing."

Interpretation isn't merely drawing caricatures in a sketchbook during lecture (and in fact, Lennon was very lucky that Bollard read his work as a form of interpretation), but rather teaching a subject through a new lens such as popular culture or re imagining a course in real life experiences. Which is in fact what Wardle and Downs have promoted through WAW.

"What we advocate for, and what remains stable in our own classrooms, is simply the underlying set of principles: engage students with the research and ideas of the field, using any means necessary and productive, in order to shift students' conceptions of writing, building declarative and procedural knowledge of writing with an eye toward transfer. That seems to be the heart of writing-about-writing: a basic belief that, as a field, we know some things and should teach them. This belief comes to be shared more broadly and stated more explicitly these days, including by scholars much more experienced than we." (Wardle and Downs)

The idea of interpretation applies more to the thought process than an actual skill, but these ideas can certainly be expanded into writing at the college level. An example of this works with argumentation: for the student's second written assignment, they wrote a review on one of the Beatles' media: a movie, book, cartoon or interview. In the review they had to argue as to whether or not this was a good example of the Beatles' work or it if reflected the Beatles in a truthful manner. This assignment allowed students to work with a nontraditional source of media and form a argument either for its success or its lack thereof.

The importance of the freshman seminar weighs not only on introducing first-year students to the expectations of college, but also allowing students to experiment outside the box of traditional education. After all, as educators we hope that students will apply what they learn in college to their post-education lives. Interpretation allows students to bring the gap between education and the professional world, through writing and other forms of expression.

Can First Year Composition Be Applied to Other Academic Courses?

So far in these journals, I've examined the benefits of first year seminar and their impact on other academic and post curricular situations. In Wardle and Downs' "Teaching about Writing, Righting about Misconceptions," the authors examine one of the major disadvantages of first year composition: the inability to transfer this style of writing to other academic courses.

In theory, first year composition should be able to prepare any student for their area of study.  After all, every student needs to write at a collegiate level during their college career. However, just because a student is trained in collegiate writing doesn't mean these skills will transfer to other areas of study.

"Even when FYC courses do attempt to directly address the complexity of "academic discourse" they tend to operate on the assumptions with little empirical verification. Our field does not know what genres and tasks will help students in the myriad writing situations they will later find themselves. We do not know if writing essays on biology in English courses helps students write lab reports in biology courses. We do not know which genres or rhetorical strategies truly are universal in the academy, not how to help FYC recognize such universality." (Wardle and Downs, p. )

I spoke to two anthropology majors (class of 2015) about the impact their FSEM class had on their majors. The first student (Sarah) took "Cinderella and Harry Potter" (an examination of the progression of fantasy into the 21st century), which was taught by a professor from the English department. When asked if this particular class prepared her for the style of writing used in anthropology, the student said it did not. "It was really just a fun class," Sarah said. "I think it was more like an introduction to the college experience."

The second student (Shelby) took an FSEM taught by faculty from the Sociology department, "Media Images of Mothers," which examined various images of mothers seen in film and television. She also disagreed that this particular class taught her the style of writing needed in anthropology. "Every department writes differently,"  Shelby said.

The difficulty faced by Sarah and Shelby is not an uncommon struggle among college students. English collegiate-writing varies greatly from the styles required for anthropology, biology, and even history. Although the first-year experience is in many ways essential as an introduction to the "college experience," FYC can be distracting to the future biology major who needs to write lab reports, or to the future anthropology major who will need to record field work.

How can FYC be altered to accommodate non-English majors?

Many universities have divided their FSEMs by department to make the transition easier for students. The University of Mary Washington offers a variety of first-year experience courses, ranging from vampires in cinema (film studies) to the solving mysteries in math (mathematics). The benefit of taking a freshman experience tied directly to one's major is the probably that skills needed in upper-level courses will most likely be taught during the seminar. Oh course, this poses a problem for the undecided major, or for the future math major who chooses to take "The Idea of Cool" (an FSEM formerly taught under the English department) based on their interest in popular culture.

The end result is that while FYC can assist students in preparing for college-level writing in general, a 100-level class is the better way for students to learn the type of writing particular to their major.

Meta Moments in Collegiate Level Writing

In Laurie McMillan's review of Down and Wardle's "Writing about Writing", I hear a lot of the same reactions I've gathered from previous works read this semester, including: writing at a college level is essential for a student's college experience; collegiate writing puts composition scholar's skills to good use; learning collegiate-level writing not only improves student writing, but also language skills and the thought process. However, McMillan also to attention another essential component of the writing process and the college experience which often gets overlooked: "Meta Moments."

McMillan describes the presence of "Meta Moments" in Downs and Wardle's work as a feature set apart in a box from the rest of the text "appearing exactly as 'Meta Moments' should appear - in their own space, where a different kind of thinking can take place." (McMillan) The idea behind "Meta Moments" - thinking outside the box - is an important feature of metacognition, which is an essential part of the thought process and of the freshman experience. 

Ah, metacognition. Where would we be without it? I say this with complete seriousness because without the role of metacognition brilliant people would still be brilliant, but wouldn't change their thinking to reach a point beyond what their predecessors (world explorers, professors, scientists, etc.) had taught them. Metacognition - the awareness or analysis of one's own learning or thinking processes - is what differentiates each scholar individually. It is essentially thinking outside the box, applying personal experience, knowledge, and opinion to understand the thought more fully, and in the end, forming a unique conclusion to the problem.

My first recollection of a professor introducing students to metacognition occurred during a creative nonfiction class I took during my junior year of college. The class had just completed workshopping our first writing assignment and were preparing for the final revision. After handing back the graded papers, our professor pulled up YouTube and played the first seventeen takes of "Strawberry Fields Forever." 

"As you can hear, the Beatles could have stopped after Take Eight or so and still have an impressive song worthy of an A-side. But they kept experimenting and polishing until they reached Take Seventeen, which is what you hear on the Magical Mystery Tour album. " the professor told us. "This is what I want you to do when revising your essays. Even when the essay looks perfect, keep working at it. It could be the difference between Take Eight and Take Seventeen."

Another form of metacognition is using a figure of contemporary culture as a vehicle to obtain academic knowledge. The University of Mary Washington provides several freshman seminars to introduce first-year students to the college environment through the lens of Harry Potter, Dracula or the Beatles to name a few. These platforms of focus successfully teach freshmen the basic elements of writing, public speaking and technology through learning about a topic of interest. It's almost, as I've heard students say on occasion, taking a class that doesn't feel like a class.

In "The Beatles in the 21st Century" FSEM, students learn the basic skills of collegiate-level writing, technology and speaking through reviewing a Beatles' movie or book and presenting an argument proving why their favorite Beatles' song is the best, to name a few. The benefit of this style of metacognition is allowing students to learn new skills in an area that they are passionate about, and through these assignments form conclusions on their favorite music, book or movies that they may never have considered before.