THE OUTCOMES BOOK

Debate and Consensus after the WPA Outcomes Statement

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-604-2

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction: Celebrating and Complicating the Outcomes Statement Susanmarie Harrington..........................................................................xv1 The Origins of the Outcomes Statement Edward M. White..........................................................................................................32 The Outcomes Project: The Insiders' History Keith Rhodes, Irvin Peckham, Linda S. Bergmann, and William Condon.................................................83 Standards, Outcomes and All That Jazz Kathleen Blake Yancey....................................................................................................184 Outcomes are not Mandates for Standardization Mark Wiley.......................................................................................................245 Expanding Our Understanding of Composing Outcomes Cynthia L. Selfe and Patricia Freitag Ericsson...............................................................326 The WPA Outcomes Statement Goes to High School Stephen Wilhoit.................................................................................................397 The Outcomes Statement at a Community College: Verification, Accreditation, and Articulation J. L. McClure.....................................................518 Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing: A View from the Field Linda Adler-Kassner and Heidi Estrem............................................................609 More Than the Latest PC Buzzword for Modes: What Genre Theory Means to Composition Barbara Little Liu..........................................................7210 Processes and Outcomes in Arizona's Higher Education System Duane Roen and Gregory R. Glau....................................................................8511 Knowledge of Conventions and the Logic of Error Donald Wolff..................................................................................................9712 Celebrating through Interrogation: Considering the Outcomes Statement through Theoretical Lenses Patricia Freitag Ericsson....................................10413 What the Outcomes Statement Could Mean for Writing across the Curriculum Martha A. Townsend...................................................................12114 First-Year Outcomes and Upper-Level Writing Susanmarie Harrington.............................................................................................12715 Using the Outcomes Statement for Technical Communication Barry M. Maid........................................................................................13916 Using Writing Outcomes to Enhance Teaching and Learning: Alverno College's Experience Robert O'Brien Hokanson.................................................15017 What the Outcomes Statement Is Not: A Reading of the Boyer Commission Report Rita Malenczyk...................................................................16218 The Outcomes Statement as Theorizing Potential: Through a Looking Glass Ruth Overman Fischer..................................................................17119 A Friendly Challenge to Push the Outcomes Statement Further Peter Elbow.......................................................................................17720 Outcomes and the Developing Learner Richard H. Haswell........................................................................................................19121 Practice: The Road to the Outcomes over Time Marilyn S. Sternglass............................................................................................201Afterword: Bowling Together: Developing, Distributing, and Using the WPA Outcomes Statement-and Making Cultural Change Kathleen Blake Yancey.....................211Notes.............................................................................................................................................................222References........................................................................................................................................................226Contributors......................................................................................................................................................234Index.............................................................................................................................................................238

Chapter One

THE ORIGINS OF THE OUTCOMES STATEMENT

Edward M. White

The question I posted to the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) listserv in 1996 was based on a series of frustrating experiences as a consultant to college and university writing programs. Typically, I would be asked to advise the program faculty on an assessment device that would place students in the appropriate course for them, the one in which they were most likely to be challenged and succeed.

"Sure," I would reply, sitting down at a conference table with the teaching faculty. "Tell me what is being taught in your courses." This would be met with an embarrassed silence. Most of the time nobody really knew what was taught in the various sections of the various writing courses listed in the college catalogue-that is, in any course besides the one a particular teacher was teaching, with the door to the classroom shut. So I would turn to the faculty member on my left and ask what that person expected students to be able to do at the end of the class.

"Do?" I would hear echoed back with perplexity. "I teach sentence structure [or grammar or paragraph structure or the reading of poetry or journal writing or James Joyce's Ulysses or a dozen other curricular ideas]. I suppose students should know ..." and the sentence would tail off into a series of indefinite abstractions. Like most other college faculty, the person on my left had focused on what the teacher did and hardly at all on what the student results were supposed to be. I would then canvass the others. "Are those your goals as well?" Not at all, would come the reply. What the first teacher sought to accomplish in English 45, Basic Writing, the second teacher taught in English 101, College Composition, and the third teacher taught in English 306, Advanced Composition. By the time we had gone halfway around the table, it was clear to everyone that we could not begin to talk about assessment until the program had some kind of structure. As long as every teacher did whatever seemed personally appropriate, and as long as more advanced work went on in some of the "basic" courses than in some of the "advanced" ones, there was no point in trying to place students in the curriculum. The problem was not so much with the different approaches taken by different teachers-that could in fact be considered a strength-but with the differing goals and expectations they expressed.

But how was the writing program to gain the needed structure? Again typically, each teacher was more or less on his or her own, at best guided by a few generalizations about the kind of reading material and writing assignments to use in each course. It seemed somehow wrong to limit a teacher, however new to the profession, however untutored in rhetoric or composition studies, by stating just what a particular writing course was supposed to accomplish. That is, an understandable resistance to making every teacher do the same thing had become a less defensible objection to developing common goals for a particular course. As long as the focus was on what the teacher did, rather than on what the student learned, there seemed to be no good answer to my uncomfortable questions.

Such a situation is absurd, unfair, and unprofessional, I have come to believe. Can we imagine a mathematics department in which Math 101 has widely different goals depending on which teacher happens to be teaching it, with some working on beginning arithmetic while others are starting calculus? So, during term break on March 13, 1996, I posed the following question to the WPA listserv, WPA-L: "Is it an impossible dream to imagine this group coming out with at least a draft set of objectives that might really work and be usable, for instance, distinguishing comp 1 from comp 2 or from "advanced" comp? We may not have professional consensus on this, though, or even consensus that we should have consensus. How would we go about trying?" (White 1996)

From that acorn has grown this oak. As it turned out, the question struck a major nerve on the list, epitomizing problems vexing many WPAs around the country, and rousing intense controversy and creativity. While composition studies has flourished as a graduate enterprise, with sixty-five Ph.D. rhetoric/composition programs now producing scholars and teachers, the first-year composition course has remained chaotic and confused, too often in its practice denying the professional work of the graduate programs flourishing on the same campus. It was time for the profession to start professionalizing the first-year composition course. The first step had been taken some years prior in a statement by the Conference on College Composition and Communication on the "principles and practices" for staffing that course (Conference 1989). Now we were ready to turn to the curriculum. What should its goals be? What should students be able to do when they leave the course at different levels with a passing course grade? The book you hold is the result of a long and arduous effort to grapple with these questions and provide guidelines for answering them.

But meanwhile a whole host of objections to an outcomes statement appeared, many of them based on long experience with American composition programs. I will focus here on three of the most prominent:

There are many and conflicting visions of just what the first-year course should accomplish. Whose outcomes should prevail?

Most of those teaching composition courses in American colleges and universities have little training in composition studies and little support from their institutions. Isn't it unfair to measure outcomes from young and inexperienced teachers? Is this a way to further harass the lowest-status teachers on campus?

The struggle to define writing programs has become-perhaps always has been-highly political. We must resist giving ammunition to the enemy, who seeks to define our work as narrowly grammatical, conventional, and socially stratified.

Let's consider each of these reasonable objections in turn, with a particular eye to the way in which the Outcomes Statement attempts to meet them.

Whose "outcomes" should prevail? The loose collection of writing program administrators who volunteered to form the "outcomes group" represented all levels of postsecondary education and many different kinds of institutions. As the Outcomes Statement began to take shape, this group held workshops and gave presentations at professional conferences, testing drafts against realities of writing programs around the country. To everyone's surprise a general consensus did begin to take shape. Key to the process was a set of crucial distinctions: outcomes are different from standards, and agreement on outcomes does not require agreement on a single best way to achieve those outcomes.

Outcomes are often confused with standards, but they are quite different concepts. An open-enrollment community college and a highly selective private college can share the same desired outcomes, while their students may achieve them at different levels. The outcomes statements of the two institutions may be quite similar, while the standard of performance may be different, for all kinds of reasons. Thus, the outcomes group early on determined that it would deal with outcomes but not standards, which must be set by each institution for its own students. Again, since no one wanted to remove teacher initiative or creativity from the classroom, the outcomes group firmly rejected any proposal to suggest "best" curricula, textbooks, or teaching procedures. Some institutions, particularly those whose teachers have little or no professional training in rhetoric and composition, may prefer to proceed with such requirements for their teachers, while other institutions will be content to allow every teacher to try to reach the outcomes in his or her own way. Kathleen Blake Yancey's chapter in this collection ("Standards, Outcomes, and All That Jazz") addressees this issue in considerable detail.

Once the concept of outcomes was divorced from standards and from teaching methods and materials, we found it possible to reach a consensus that appeared to meet the needs of the wide range of institutions we represented and consulted. While that consensus is always subject to revision, and the outcomes group expects the present statement to be revised periodically as the needs of students change, we present a statement of desired outcomes from the first-year composition course that is generally applicable across American higher education in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Isn't it unfair to measure outcomes from young and inexperienced teachers? The key to assessing student outcomes is to recognize that, however much teachers may labor, students must ultimately take responsibility for their own learning. We much regret the labor practices of many colleges and universities, which are often exploitative for those teaching the first-year writing course. At the same time, we know that those teaching composition in American colleges and universities on the whole do an excellent job under most difficult conditions. As writing program administrators, we have a primary responsibility for evaluating and improving our writing programs. The Outcomes Statement looks at campus writing programs, not individual writing teachers.

We must resist giving ammunition to the enemy, who seeks to define our work as narrowly grammatical, conventional, and socially stratified. One professional problem the Outcomes Statement is designed to address is the common reductive definition of what writing programs seek to accomplish. We have allowed others to define us, and some of those definitions have little to do with our actual work. Few college programs spend much time on vocabulary drill, spelling rules, or handwriting practice, for instance. The Outcomes Statement gives us a sophisticated and mature view of what college writing programs seek to do, demonstrating why these writing courses belong in the college curriculum, usually at the center of general education, and what other faculty should expect their students to have learned in those courses. We hope that a widespread understanding of these outcomes will benefit students, as other teachers expect them to transfer what they have learned in composition to other courses, and help these teachers to reinforce what we do as they ask for writing in their own fields.

I am pleased that the questions I posed seven years ago (at this writing) have opened into so many different avenues, each in turn raising new questions about the purposes and the objectives of the course required by almost all American colleges and universities. The Outcomes Statement that has emerged suggests some of the answers that thoughtful and reflective practitioners have in turn produced. But all answers produce new questions, and this book explores many of the questions that have emerged over the last few years as a result of the use of the Outcomes Statement, a document whose time at last has come.

Chapter Two

THE OUTCOMES PROJECT The Insiders' History

Keith Rhodes Irvin Peckham Linda S. Bergmann William Condon

If ever there has been a project that won't really fit into a nutshell, the Outcomes project is it. This project began in frustration over the apparent inability to share or even specify widely what goes on in first-year composition. We-the Outcomes Collective, as we called ourselves-proceeded with a grassroots effort to do that, if only for ourselves. We ended with a document that, though it is addressed to an audience of writing program administrators and writing teachers, nevertheless supplies information that the various stakeholders in first-year composition-students, administrators, parents, legislators, the public at large (in addition to teachers and WPAs)-have some right to know. And more importantly, we ended with a document that can be used to promote smart and essential conversations about writing.

Before going on, we need to provide an aside about this chapter. This history of the Outcomes Statement book project has a history of its own. When the Outcomes Statement was new, we turned our gaze inward and backward. The statement was freshly created and had not yet been adopted by anyone. The Outcomes Collective conceived of this book as one that would explain the origins and motivations of that statement. The four authors to which this history is attributed wrote separate essays exploring different aspects of those origins and motivations. We sought to generate the sort of understanding that would lead to uses. As it turns out, the uses came on their own; and as they did, the purpose of the book evolved, so that it needed to focus outward and forward. We had woven a rich and self-satisfying historical tapestry; but eventually it became simply too much of a good inside game. The original need for such essays had mostly been met without them, so they have now been reduced and combined into this one.

Thus, the process of writing this chapter started with our needs and circumstances as writers, but then shifted to a concern for audience. As might be expected, that is the same process that this chronicle will describe in the history of the statement itself. Yet the "writer-based" motivations may still influence the interpretation of the final product; and so we hope to illuminate some of the key features of that process and of the Outcomes Statement's rhetorical situation by presenting some part, at least, of the inside story in the inside voices. We will not be so dramatic as to make this an obvious dialogue; but along the way there will be some obvious changes in voice, some disjunctures of flow. Rather than smooth them all out, we have left just a bit of a textual reminder of the multitude of voices that came together in the statement itself.

THE COMMUNITY OF COBBLERS

There was a good bit of joy and a lot of community in the building of this document, and that is why those of us who worked on it have maintained a commitment to it. What has been most gratifying about working with the Outcomes group is that not only did the group collaborate in the mode described by John Trimbur as "engaging in a process of intellectual negotiation and collective decision-making" (1989, 602), we also formulated a document that we all can live with pretty well-no one negotiated away the farm. We worked as a team, parceling out the work when necessary, for every one of us has been repeatedly or continually swamped with work of our own and with the demands of personal and professional responsibilities. In formulating proposals for panels and workshops, drafts of the Outcomes Statement, and this book itself, the process worked something like this: Someone would notice an impending deadline and send out a call for ideas. Ideas would tumble in. Controversies would arise-should the Outcomes Statement include a technology plank, for example-and sides would be taken. Inevitably someone would start a round of bad jokes or puns. Ed White would calm us down like a good uncle, and David Schwalm would structure our options like the dean that he is. And then someone-perhaps Susanmarie Harrington, Karen Vaught-Alexander, Bill Condon, or most often Rita Malenczyk-would outline a format. Everyone would red-pencil it into submission. A face-to-face planning meeting would be scheduled, we'd review our plans, and another panel would set off to present the idea and the draft to another assemblage of writing teachers.

(Continues...)

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