Writing Fellow Interview Series Part II

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed a colleague of mine, Greg Peterson, about his experiences working as a Writing Fellow in a Communication Disorders class. This interview made me even more curious, and I decided that I just had to know more about the Writing Fellow program.

Luckily my Writing Center Director, Dr. Tim Taylor, had a wonderful suggestion for me: "Why don't you interview Professor Fahy (the professor who Greg works for as a Writing Fellow) and see what she has to say about the program?" 

Sometimes I wonder where I would be without my wonderful faculty mentors...

So, I contacted Professor Fahy, and she agreed to be interviewed for the blog. This is the very first Writing Fellow program that has been offered at EIU, which I think makes these interviews extremely exciting (nerd alert, I know). Let me introduce you to Ms. Fahy a little more:

Jill Fahy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Disorders and Sciences at Eastern Illinois University, where she teaches courses in Acquired Language Disorders, Executive Functions, Right Hemisphere Disorders, and Neurology.  Ms. Fahy lectures nationally on the assessment and treatment of executive function disorders and associated communication impairments. She recently delivered the keynote address for an international conference of speech-language pathologists from Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.  Ms. Fahy also supervises clinical practicum at the EIU Speech-Language-Hearing Clinic, focusing disorders of aphasia, executive dysfunction, social communication disorders, and cognitive-communication disorders.  Ms. Fahy has co-authored an article on the clinical implications of neuroscience research in Broca’s area, published in Topics in Stroke Rehabilitation, and is co-author of The Source for Development of Executive Functions.  Prior to teaching at EIU, Ms. Fahy provided services to populations with acquired neurological deficits in medical settings.  She also happens to be an alumnus of EIU, with an undergraduate degree in French.

What follows are the fantastic responses Professor Fahy provided to my questions.

1.  What interested you in participating in the Writing Fellow program? 

I have always been interested in how students develop into educated, articulate, thoughtful professionals.  I am interested in how students learn, think, process information, draw conclusions, explain information, and defend their suggestions or conclusions.  One of my favorite things to ask students, in class, is Why? … or, How do you know that? And, although it may sound strange, one of my favorite things to do is grade writing assignments because it lets me see how students craft their thoughts and choose their words.  Students’ written work is almost like a picture—a snapshot into their evolving ability to think, organize, and articulate big ideas.

The opportunity to participate in the Writing Fellow program just evolved, really, following some ongoing discussions about student writing with Dr. Tim Taylor, Director of the EIU Writing Center.  Tim and I both happen to serve on the CAA Learning Goals Writing Sub-Committee, and one day he asked if I might be interested in participating in the first round of a new program he and his colleagues were crafting.  A few conversations later, and we were situated to have the first embedded Writing Fellow on campus integrated into a junior level CDS class that I am teaching this spring.    

2.  I recently wrote a blog about the importance of writing in plain language. My son was born with a hearing disorder, and I had a lot of problems understanding the literature that our doctors gave us. I found myself longing for literature written in plain language. Do you think that students in the CDS field should learn to write for multiple audiences (colleagues and the layperson)?

    

Absolutely. And yet this can be a challenge, for many reasons.  Students working towards the required graduate degree in Communication Disorders & Sciences must not only master a vast array of disorder-related knowledge, but must also develop critical thinking skills sufficient to support the ability to, eventually, make accurate diagnoses, and generate defensible recommendations. And, clearly, we also must foster students’ ability to communicate those conclusions and recommendations in the language of the consumer—whomever that may be.  In any given day, a speech-language pathologist or audiologist may need to communicate information to a neurologist, then the spouse of a patient with a traumatic brain injury, followed by the radiologist, and then the patient himself.  If we are working in an educational environment, our audience might range from the classroom teacher to the one-on-one aide for a student with disabilities, followed immediately by a conversation with parents, and then a group of six four-year old children.  We must learn to convey information clearly, accurately, tactfully, and honestly.  In plain language.  For the consumer. 

3.   What type of writing assignments do you usually craft?

I try to give students the opportunity to practice communicating complicated information to a particular audience for a specific reason.  For example, two of the assignments I have given in class this semester have required students to explain various aspects of traumatic brain injury and protection of the brain to parents of children or adolescents.  The assignments required students to write this text as though they were hired to write educational brochures—the kind of reading material you pick up when you sit for an hour at the doctor’s office.  Learning to think more deliberately about the audience, and the tone, of my writing assignments has definitely been one of the advantages of my collaboration with Greg (Peterson), the Writing Fellow dedicated this semester to my neurology class (CDS 3500).  

4.  Have you noticed a difference in the quality of writing that your students are producing since having a Writing Fellow in the classroom?

YES.  Students meet with Greg at least once, and sometimes twice, as they are working on each of the writing assignments.  One specific change I have noticed is the tremendous growth in students’ ability to craft clear, specific, meaningful sentences. In past years, there were times when I truly could not discern the meaning of a simple sentence.  I could talk with the student about this, and ask them to try, verbally, to explain to me their intent, and there, buried amongst the confusion would be a nugget of clarity, but it rarely came out in the writing.  I have also noticed improvement in students’ ability to organize information into a purposeful, cohesive structure.  Papers turned in to me have a clear opening purpose.  The body of the paper transitions from one relevant point to the next.  Conclusions have become more useful.  As Greg says, students final paragraphs actually answer the “so what” question that anchors the entire purpose of the paper.  As I grade my students’ writing this semester, I feel relieved, not frustrated.  I feel as though I am reading the product of an actual investment in time, energy, and thought—not something written blindly the night before. I feel hopeful that our students are leaving this class with the tools to become skillful communicators. 

5.  What do you think the difference is between scientific style writing and the type of writing often seen in an English composition classroom?

It has been a long time since I had an English composition class, so I may be off-base, but I would say that scientific writing primarily requires the use of objective language and statements of fact.  There is little room for subjectivity or personal opinion. Depending on the audience, scientific documents may expect certain procedures for formatting and inclusion of data.  Expectations must also be met for how well diagnostic conclusions and recommendations are supported and defended.  Students learning to write in our particular discipline have plenty of opportunities to master the brief progress note for therapy, or the lengthy diagnostic report, or the scientific article review.  But they may benefit from more specific opportunities to learn the art of explaining complicated information about the brain, or the trachea, or developmental linguistics, in plain language.  Parents, teachers, family members, or even policy makers and advocates—these are the people with whom our students also need to write and speak. 

6.  Do you think that each discipline would benefit from teaching their own writing course, one that is solely suited to the discipline being studied? Or do you believe that learning to write in a multitude of methods (interdisciplinary) is the best?

That’s a good question.  I suppose my initial reaction is to suggest that we need to develop students’ higher-level writing skills within the discipline.  We worry a lot about whether or not students in our upper division classes master the content required to meet certain requirements.  It may be that we could spend a little more time deliberately teaching discipline-specific writing to help our students assimilate, synthesize, analyze, and apply their content-knowledge in new ways.  Communicating information to various audiences is perhaps the most critical skill we can foster in our students.  It really doesn’t matter if our students leave here as experts in the content of their work, if our students cannot convey that knowledge or expertise to the people with whom they work.

7. Will you do the Writing Fellow program again? If so, would you change anything about it?

YES.  I would love to work with the Writing Fellow program again. The collaboration and benefits are such that I would gladly have a Writing Fellow in this class every year.  But I also anticipate a surge in faculty applying for this opportunity, and now that I’ve had my chance, it is someone else’s turn.  And no, I wouldn’t change any aspect of this program.  I do intend to compare our assessment data from last year’s class, to this year, in terms of the quality of writing. I’m curious to see what objective changes appear, in addition to my own subjective perceptions about the quality of writing.  It would also be helpful to track the long-term benefits of the Writing Fellow program across the campus, and to support the Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum programs, as they continue to develop ways to support both faculty and students.  

Special thanks to Jill Fahy for taking the time to respond so wonderfully to my questions.

Defeating My Arch Nemesis: Using Writing to Learn Math

When I was in first grade, a skinny six-year old sporting long piggy tails and buck teeth, I quickly learned that math was very hard for me.  Longingly I watched my friends go out for recess while I sat inside and attempted to fix the math problems I had done incorrectly earlier. I just couldn't do them right.

And when I couldn't do them right, my teacher would sit me in the corner. Humiliating. I was the girl constantly in tears in the corner, and the cute boy in class (who was a math whiz) thought I was some sort of weirdo (which I am....but still).

The experience created an instant mental math block that I have fought  my entire life. The rest of my grade school career was bleak in the math department, and I have to admit that I never passed a high school Algebra class.

When I started my college career at Parkland College, back in the mid-90s, I had to take basic math. I was not surprised and slowly worked my way up to beginning Algebra. The first day of my college Algebra class sent me into nervous fits. I felt like my six-year old self, only with straighter teeth and shorter hair.

I was determined to do better, and I only wanted to take this class one time. Due to the fact that I came from a large family with not so large of an income, it was up to me to pay for my schooling, and I knew that I did not want to pay to re-take an Algebra class. So, I had resolved to work my butt off and figure this whole math thing out even if it caused my hair to go prematurely gray.

I walked up to my professor before class, wish I could remember her name because she changed my life, and told her of my math woes. She smiled and nodded and asked me what my interests were. At the time my interests circulated around my boyfriend (so stupid!), but I managed to say something like, "Well, I really like English and Theater." She then told me that she had some tricks up her sleeves that could help me with my struggles, and we started class.

Well, I didn't believe her.

I had been told, by many teachers and tutors, that they knew exactly what to do to "fix" me and cure me of my math ignorance. So naturally I just took a deep breath preparing to weather the storm.

After my professor had handed out the syllabus, explained the schedule, and let us introduce ourselves, she dismissed the class for the day--then quickly asked me to stay for a few minutes. She told me that I would need a separate notebook for the class that would become my Algebra Writing log.  I looked at her like she was crazy.

She laughed.

"Kelly, have you ever done journal entry work in your writing or English classes?" she asked. I nodded yes and told her that journaling was one of my favorite things to do.  She then told me that I would be doing this for my homework and in-class activities.  My professor took out a notebook and showed me exactly what I would be writing in my log--it looked something like this:

• Date
• Topic or Chapter/Assignment Name
• Description of pages read in textbook, lecture notes, and in-class activity notes
• Main points from the section being assigned in a bullet point list
• Summary of main points from book/class written in paragraph form

Not only did she have me do this weekly math log, but she also assigned me paragraphs to write.  My professor would write an equation on the board each week, usually on Monday, and by Friday a paragraph was due to her that explained how to solve the problem and why I had decided to solve it in that way. 

I was kind of shocked that I was using writing do help me understand math.  I had never thought that "math" people wrote. In the article "Writing to Learn Mathematics" Bernadette Russek says, "Contrary to popular belief mathematicians must write and must write well...Writing is a valuable assessment tool. It is used to assess attitudes and beliefs, mathematics ability, and ability to express ideas clearly" (36).  Russek also suggests that writing is often used in the math department to "...open doors of communication with students who may have math anxiety or who have 'I hate math' feelings, students who have never really 'spoken' to their mathematics professors before" (36). 

I feel as if Russek might have been directing that last bit directly at me....

Thanks to my professor's willingness to use writing in the math classroom, I passed beginning Algebra with an A. The first A I had ever received in a math class my entire life. I'm still proud of that A.

I moved onward and upward and eventually managed to tackle a college Algebra class. I did not get another A, but I did get a B, and I was able to mark math off of the list of classes I needed to take to finish school.

I really, really, really wanted to take my passing math grades to my former first grade teacher and say, "HA! Take that! See! If you would have just been willing to teach me math in a language I understood, instead of sitting me in a corner, I would have been done with this a LONG TIME AGO."

I wisely did not do that, but man did I ever dream of it.

After I completed my general education requirements, I thought that I would never have to take a math class again. However, my children have proved me wrong (as they usually do), and I find myself helping them with their math homework. Unfortunately, my kids also struggle with math and I sometimes feel as if maybe I should not be the person helping them. 

It's kind of like the blind leading the blind.  So, we write about math. Each day we write out their assignment in paragraph form and then we talk about it and pretty soon those math problems are getting solved correctly. 

If you would like to read the rest of Bernadette Russek's article it can be found here.  As Writing Across the Curriculum becomes more prominent on college campuses and within K-12 curriculum, I'm sure that writing in the math class will be used more often.

EIU President William Perry has used writing in his math classroom, and in an April 2011 interview with the EIU Writes Blog writers (found here) Perry said that: "...mathematics has a language all its own, you all know; you’ve taken math, so you do a math homework; it’s one set of language. But now if you’re going to talk about how that relates to maybe football head injuries or supply and demand, you know these kind of things, you have to interpolate that for your audience. You have to convert mathematical concepts to plain English, and so that’s a valid exercise because I think in all of our lives, we’re always interacting with multiple audiences." 

To me multiple audiences means multiples discourses, which then equals various types of verbal and cultural languages. In a perfect world teachers will be able to teach in a method that answers the needs of all of their students, but that perfect world is more than likely not going to happen in my lifetime.

So, instead of waiting for that perfect world to arrive, try remembering the skinny little six-year old sitting in the corner of her first grade classroom. Don't be afraid to speak to students in languages they understand--even if that means writing in a math classroom.

The Power of Therapeutic Writing & Freewriting

The majority of posts for EIU Writes discuss matters that focus on college writing and professional writing.

For this post, however, I want to provide information about unstructured and personal writing that connect to important research done by James Pennebaker, Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University Texas at Austin. In addition, scholars are using Pennebaker's research findings to influence pedagogy. For example, EIU's own Nia Klein wrote her excellent Master's thesis in English titled  It's Not Catharsis; It's Cognition: A New Approach to Emotion in Composition in 2010. And she's directed therapeutic writing groups for cancer survivors in the Champaign-Urbana area.

Pennebaker has produced important research over the past thirty years or so, and a recent article from Ode Magazine highlights his psychological research about therapeutic writing and how the words used in personal writing are markers of mental health and growth.

As Inge Schilperoord relates early on in "The Power of Pronouns," "Intuitively, we've known for centuries that this loose kind of writing [diaries, journals, freewriting] is good for our creativity. But what we didn't know until recently is that 15 minutes of free writing a day can help us fight cancer, high blood pressure, heart attacks, and loneliness--and that autobiographical writer who use a variety of pronouns (I and me but also we and you and they) laugh more and take fewer aspirins than those who stick to the first person singular."

Pennebaker and colleagues have done groundbreaking research about language use and the therapeutic uses of writing. And for those interested, on his departmental webpage, he has a page titled "Writing and Health: Some Practical Advice."

His advice coheres with the method of freewriting used in college writing classes made popular by Peter Elbow. As I enjoy saying when I introduce this activity and have my students freewrite in class, "Free your mind, and the ideas will follow." 

As evidenced by the page about "Freewriting & Focused Freewriting" by the Writing Across the Curriculum program at the University of Richmond, this method can be used in various classes, especially when analyzing important reading selections associated with the course. Freewriting can be used a powerful writing-to-learn activity to promote discussion, foster reflection, and help students make connections.

But what Pennebaker's research mostly focuses on is the therapeutic use of writing, and his recent book, The Secret Life of Pronouns, informs us that people "whose use of causal and insight words continued to increase as they wrote benefited the most, Pennebaker says. That's because causal-word use indicates that a person is making a story out of the experience" (Schilperoord). And "insight words" denote that a person is attempting to make sense of an experience.

Both Pennebaker's research about therapeutic writing and how instructors use freewriting in varied contexts remind me of a passage in "Reflections on Contemporary Currents in Writing Center Work" by Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede [Writing Center Journal 31.1 (2001)]. The authors describe how Lunsford and her student used conversation as a means of discovery: "as Andrea and the student sat there, he literally talked and wrote his way through his problem to a thesis -- a powerful one that was quite different from anything in his current draft. This is what we mean when we say that talking is important to writing and that writing, at its best, is 'epistemic' -- it creates knowledge rather than simply recording it" (16).

Like productive conversations in writing centers, freewriting and personal writing can create discoveries and support growth.

The Case Against the Lecture Format

In a recent article/story from National Public Radio this week, "Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool," Emily Hanford reports that scientists from various universities are changing their teaching methods because of the inefficacy of the lecture format. The link above provides the article, and you can also listen to the story as it ran on NPR stations.

As Hanford relates, "[t]his is something many people have known intuitively for a long time — the physicists just came up with the hard data. Their work, along with research by cognitive scientists, provides a compelling case against lecturing."

The story highlights what Professor Mazur calls "peer instruction," which also could be labeled "active learning."

And the article also provides a link to a documentary series by Hanford titled Don't Lecture Me.

I hope these links and programs provide readers something to think about, but I'd also like to note that the Writing Center and the pedagogy of Writing Across the Curriculum provide learning platforms that do not espouse the lecture format. 

Put simply, writing consultants (tutors) at the EIU Writing Center offer something akin to Mazur's "peer instruction." While consultants obviously don't grade students' papers, they provide solid feedback about their ideas and drafts while considering the rhetorical principles of audience, purpose, genre, and style, among many other important considerations such as supporting evidence, use of sources, and sentence-level concerns.

Also connected to the science professors who are changing their teaching methods, Writing Across the Curriculum offers pedagogical strategies and tactics that move away from the "sage on the stage" role.

Below are some links from EIU's Writing Across the Curriculum webpage that professors, students, and aspiring educators might find helpful. These links, along with many others, can be found on the "Resources for Faculty" page:

• WAC Clearinghouse Teaching Exchange
• "Integrating Writing Into Any Course: Starting Points" by Kate Kiefer
• Designing Writing Assignments
• Examples of Informal, Exploratory Writing Activities
• "What is Writing to Learn?" from the WAC Clearinghouse
• "Using Writing to Improve Reading" from the University of Hawaii at Manoa Writing Program
• Shelley's Quick Guides for Writing Teachers: Critical Reading Assignments

Recommended WAC Resource: Engaging Ideas

Last month the second edition of what some people refer to as the "WAC Bible" was published. Engaging Ideas now has a new edition.

If someone were to ask me what I think is the single best WAC resource out there, my recommendation would be Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom by John C. Bean. It's an outstanding resource.

Since the book's first edition in 1996, colleges worldwide have used this text as the basis for professional development workshops because it offers different ideas, approaches, and methods for using writing as a tool for critical thinking and reflective engagement in diverse disciplines.

Bean is a Consulting Professor of Writing and Assessment at Seattle University, and he's the author and co-author of a number of writing textbooks. As part of the second edition's "About the Author" section relates, Bean "has done extensive consulting across the United States and Canada on writing across the curriculum, critical thinking, and university outcomes assessment," and "In 2010 his article "Messy Problems and Lay Audiences: Teaching Critical Thinking within the Finance Curriculum" (coauthored with colleagues from finance and economics) won the 2008 McGraw Hill-Magna Publications Award for the year's best scholarly work on teaching and learning" (xxi).

Like the first version of Engaging Ideas, the second edition provides a progression from why to how. The book has four parts with sixteen chapters. Below are the chapter titles to show what the text covers:

1. Using Writing to Promote Thinking: A Busy Professor's Guide to the Whole Book
2. How Writing is Related to Critical Thinking
3. Helping Writers Think Rhetorically
4. Using a Range of Genres to Extend Critical Thinking and Deepen Learning
5. Dealing with Issues of Grammar and Correctness
6. Formal Writing Assignments
7. Informal, Exploratory Writing Activities
8. Designing Tasks to Promote Active Thinking and Learning
9. Helping Students Read Difficult Texts
10. Using Small Groups to Coach Thinking and Teach Disciplinary Argument
11. Bringing More Critical Thinking into Lectures and Discussions
12. Enhancing Learning and Critical Thinking in Essay Exams
13. Designing and Sequencing Assignments to Teach Undergraduate Research
14. Using Rubrics to Develop and Apply Grading Criteria
15. Coaching the Writing Process and Handling the Paper Load
16. Writing Comments on Students' Papers

While the book is geared more toward those of us who teach at the college level, the text would also benefit Education majors who could implement a writing across the curriculum/writing in the disciplines approach in their classrooms.

Part 4 of the Interview with President Perry: The Power of Words

"It's through writing, I believe, that you do start to understand yourself."

[Hebeler]

You’ve kind of addressed the next questions I was going to ask you about procrastination, and I really liked the way that you put of all that, so I think I’ll let Dan ask his questions.

[Davis] 

Okay.

[Davis] 

You’ve told us about different applications of writing, and you’ve told us about different steps in your writing process. Is there any one process or any one aspect of your writing that you particularly like, and conversely is there one aspect that you just absolutely dread?

[Perry]

Well, okay so let’s take the different kinds of writing—the part I like for the writing has to do with the job and all that. The part I like there is defining on the front end: Audience, message. Because that clarifies a lot for you right there.

And once I get that clear in my head and that’s not always clear because you’re meaning. Let’s say you’re going to be meeting with the Mattoon Rotary, and you’re going to be talking about something. The audience isn’t the Mattoon Rotary.

You’ve got to look at who’s all in there, the different segments of the community, and then you’ve got to think what are the common threads there, so you may end up knowing you’re going to be addressing, you know, one audience when you’re talking about the Renewable Energy Center, another audience when you’re talking about enrollment, and another audience when you’re talking about community service. And so I that’s the part I like, it’s getting that identified.

In terms of more personal, really personal writing, I like it when I find the right word.

In haiku, you know you’ve got these syllables, and I know of course if you in different languages of course the syllables change and meaning changes and all that, but I just do English okay? So, getting it right, at least what I think is right, is very satisfying because sometimes you’ll write it and you’ll have the write number of syllables and you’ll be getting almost the intent you want. But changing one of the words sometimes can really make things fall into place, kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, you know. You do a jigsaw puzzle, and you’re down to just a few spots left, and boy this looks like it goes right there, you know, it almost does, but it doesn’t quite. So it’s the same with words. So that’s very satisfying. I like that. A lot of enjoyment out of that.

[Davis] 

Well splitting it up again into your professional and personal writing, what would you say have been your most successful or favorite writing experiences?

[Perry] 

Well, I’d say maybe a couple of the mathematics papers I wrote. I felt like, you know, when it was all done, I felt very good about the way I had put together. A lot of the stuff that I wrote was in applied mathematics, so I was wanting to strike the right balance, you know, between theory and application, you know.

Proofs but also computational examples that show that the theorem not only is true because you proved it, but you actually can use it to compute solutions to certain kinds of equations. So that’s been very satisfying.

But I think my personal writing, I think students already know. They get to us and they’ve already gone through a lot in their life. And there’s going to be more of that to come, and I think to the extent that they can see writing as a way to deal with issues. It’s not like their writing for anybody else. They’re not going to publish it. Some people keep diaries. Some people just every now and then say I’ve got to write about this. Sometimes they tear it up. Sometimes they keep it in a book.

But, I think words have such power for us. That’s why we have to be careful, you know, in using speech with other people. I mean, yes, we have freedom of speech, but we can sure hurt people with our speech. But the power of words enables us to deal with our own emotions too and deal with the things that are happening to us in our lives. So it’s been satisfying when I’ve been able to face some of those things, deal with some of those things in that way.

[Kory]

Well, to take it back into maybe your professional writing, when you see other people doing the kind of writing you do, so you read a speech, or, you know, you see some of that, when do you think like “Oh, I wish I said that.”

[Perry] 

I wish I’d said that.

[Kory] 

What do you really admire in that you see people doing well in the kind of writing that you also do?

[Perry] 

Well, I see brevity and imagery.

Someone will write something, and it will bring something to mind. I think that’s very valuable. You know, you think about examples: with malice toward none, charity for all, ask not what your country can do for you but what you, I know there are names for that kind of construction.

[Kory]

Right.

[Perry] 

But wording that connects you to the speaker and to the speech.

I think one of the great things about Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is its, we all know the part about I have a dream, but you look at the whole speech, and you see imagery in many, many places, very powerful imagery and it’s not with a lot of words.

It’s just, you know, a few words you get this imagery towards you. Franklin Roosevelt, and of course a lot, you’re shaped, I’m shaped by what I studied, what I’ve heard. Those are the kind of things that get me: just short, powerful words with imagery and a call to action. You see this as something more than just some words sitting on the page. It’s something that’s reaching out to you, saying, you know, you need to do something.

[Kory] 

So it’s about when you see writing that works, or sort of that sort of good writing that sort of you know it when you see it. Has anyone ever, to take a sort of more intellectualized version of that, is there, has anyone said anything to you about writing that you said like “Yes!”? Have you gotten good advice about writing?

[Perry] 

Oh well, the best advice I ever had, got was “Know your audience.”

Part 2 of the Interview with President Perry: Living the Examined Life--Writing is the Key

"And writing's the key."

[Houchens]
We often hear people cite certain authors or texts as being kind of their inspiration for how they write or why they write. Do you have any authors or texts that kind of inspired you?

[Perry]
Well, Tony Hillerman is one, and the reason is that he respects culture he respects the culture he’s writing about. And in fact he was recognized by, I believe, the Navajo for his sensitivity to that because these are murder mysteries, and they’re written in the four corners region. So, you have these two, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, these detectives and but also because you learn something from what he’s writing.

I remember one book in particular he’s talking about, I can’t remember if its Leaphorn or Chee is interviewing a grandmother who’s related to someone who may be involved in a crime and so forth and so on, and he talks about the rhythm of the conversation—that there is a rhythm. And that sometimes if you wait just a little bit longer, then the person will say the most important thing next.

And so that’s something that’s important in the way we interact with people, certainly as an administrator or a teacher or a friend, you know. If you’re a good listener and if you wait, sometimes the next thing will be the most important thing.

Wallace Stegner—Angle of Repose was a very challenging book for me, very affecting because it’s about life. Angle of Repose, if you pile up sand or coal or anything like that, the pile makes a certain angle with the ground. That’s the angle of repose, and so the sense I got out of the book is as life goes on we settle into an angle of repose ourselves through our life experiences, and that’s a valuable lesson for me too because we all go through things in our lives. And they affect us in different ways, and we have to know how to deal with, if you will, the gravity of life, but we can struggle against it, but we’re not like sand where its poured and that’s it, so I thought that interesting.

T.S. Elliot, some of his poetry, you know, been very influential for me, and then just in terms of something exciting to read I think Alexander Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo. He can spin a great yarn, sort to speak.

Those all, those have been influential to me. One author who I heard speak once that said something very important, in my opinion, was Robert Olen Butler and who won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction several years ago. And he said that every time he writes he has to, in so many words, get past his demons—that it’s always in his process.

Any time you write, of course it depends on the purpose of your writing, and sometimes it’s very personal because you’re dealing with something, that’s different than writing a memo or email obviously. But when you’re writing something that’s really deeply connected to who you are, I think you do have to go through that, and you have to recognize that, and you do to have deal with it. And I think sometimes what happens when we hit that wall, sometimes we can’t push through it, and sometimes that’s why we can’t write because there’s an unanticipated block, but if we know it’s coming, sometimes we can work our way through it.

[Kory]
In a way, in the Writing Center I think that plays out when people come in with a personal statement. Why do I want to go to graduate school?

[Perry]
Right.

[Kory]
I mean you really get, but people are also very receptive to talking about that. I mean, those are some of the most productive conversations we have in here because the writer cares deeply.

[Perry]
Right.

[Kory]
About the outcome, but also they’ve been asked to write about themselves and externalize things they’ve been thinking.

[Perry]
Right and I think writing in general in terms of Integrative Learning, there is a self-examination that occurs either voluntarily or involuntarily. And that’s another value of I think writing and its connection, very strong connection with Integrative Learning is, well what is it, the unexamined life is not worth living.

So, one of the main purposes of college I think is that self-examination and understanding what are our values, how did we come to have these values, what are our presuppositions, challenging our own presuppositions about the way things are and what’s the way they should be. And how do I take philosophy and history and sociology and all the courses that I am taking, how do I pull that together to formulate my approach to the world, how do I frame my world view?

And writing’s the key.

Part 1 of the Interview with President Perry: Writing & Making Connections

"Well, I think it’s connected to Integrative Learning." 

[Taylor] 

President Perry, thanks for coming to the Writing Center for the interview for EIU Writes, and we’re just going to ask you a few questions about writing and writing at EIU.

[Perry] 

Great. My pleasure to be here.

[Hebeler] 

Okay, President Perry, you just told us you that you are a mathematician.

[Perry] 

Right.

[Hebeler] 

And that was one of my first questions: What was your professional background before you came to Eastern in 2007, and what kinds of writing did you have to do before you became President?

[Perry]             

Right. Well, I was at another university for 36 years, and I went through the ranks in mathematics, and then I got into administration, so I wrote mathematical research papers. I wrote some textbooks, a handbook, and then I started writing memos and plans—those kind of administrative things that you do. So, professionally, that’s what almost all of my writing has been. I’ve served on some boards for nonprofits and so occasionally. In the positions there, I would have to write things. Those were more planning documents or sometimes a letter, letters to constituencies.

[Hebeler] 

Okay. Since you’ve been here at Eastern, have you developed any new kinds of writing projects that you didn’t do before? I know you’ve got a newsletter that I’ve seen on the website.

[Perry] 

Well, of course there are many ways to reach different constituencies, and I’ve been more in contact with alumni here than I had been in my previous position, so using electronic ways to reach out there has been important. But also I think emails to the campus community—I haven’t done too many of those because I think they can create fatigue—but I try to do those in an episodic basis, so that they remain effective.

So, on the side for the hobby writing, I’ve done some poetry, just for personal consumption, you know, and some 5-7-5 haiku. I find that’s interesting because you have to be very spare. Every word counts. And often times you have to really push your way through an emotion or something that’s working on you at that particular time, so I find that, I find that satisfying as well.

[Hebeler] 

Thanks.

[Taylor] 

Well, one of my colleagues reminded me when you came to the English department meeting that you mentioned that you use writing in your math courses.

[Perry] 

Right.

[Taylor] 

And a lot of people have this conception that math or the sciences … not much writing in them. So why do you use writing in your math classes and what’s the payoff?

[Perry] 

Well, I think it’s connected to Integrative Learning. So, one of the things I did in the past, in a linear algebra class I taught, was I asked the students to pick something in the world that was related to mathematics, and that was interesting experience because they didn’t immediately … nothing sprung to mind, so I had to sort of prep myself and said what about movies? So I said, oh well  A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting and these kind of things, kind of tells you about when I was doing this, but and then I would mention maybe an article or two maybe that had appeared in a newspaper or a magazine or something like this, so they started to get the drift and gradually built a list of things. So then I said, “You can approach it from any point of view you want, but I want there to be somehow mathematics as maybe a generator of the project,” you know. So they were all over the map, and it was really great.

One I remember in particular was this engineering student wrote about A Beautiful Mind and was talking about actors having to portray people with mental illness say—the sense being that you couldn’t really do that and as an actor. You couldn’t do that and so it was intellectually dishonest for an actor to actually take that on, to portray someone, and that was interesting because then you start to really get talking about some interesting nonmathematical things about the arts, about acting, and so forth and so on. But then some others were connected … different kinds of writing. One person turned in a digital project; another person turned in a voice project, and so I allowed a lot of freedom there, and I started to see there’s a lot of creativity out there and mathematics sometimes can provide the spark for it.

Now here with Integrative Learning last fall when I taught linear algebra developed some three projects, and students gave preferences, and they ended up being the project group, and the outcome of that was then to write a reflective paper on connections that this made for them with maybe the career they had planned or other courses they had taken, so forth and so on.

And, the point is that if you are going to relate mathematics to something else, you have to—mathematics has a language all its own, you all know; you’ve taken math, so you do a math homework; it’s one set of language. But now if you’re going to talk about how that relates to maybe football head injuries or supply and demand, you know these kind of things, you have to interpolate that for your audience. You have to convert mathematical concepts to plain English, and so that’s a valid exercise because I think in all of our lives, we’re always interacting with multiple audiences.

We’re trying to make a connection one way or another. I think social networks give you examples of ways people are trying to connect and connecting, so having a common set of language and interactions is an important part of it. So, I think the payoff—the payoff—is for people to see that mathematics does connect with the world, but it’s like having an adaptor like when you when you travel to Europe you got to have the special adapter and all that. It’s learning how to do that, and if you can learn to do that with mathematics and something else, then I think you can start to make the connections in multiple fields.

Coming Soon: Interview with President Perry

In the next two weeks, we'll provide videos and transcripts of our interview with EIU President William Perry from earlier this semester.

We're providing the interview in four parts since it runs a total of approximately thirty-five minutes from start to end.

I'd like to thank all of the writers of this blog for their contributions in the interview. In particular, much gratitude needs to be heaped upon Chris Houchens since he transcribed it all.

And we all thank Graphic Designer Michael Babcock from the Center for Academic Technology and Support (CATS) for taping the interview, producing it, and getting it up on YouTube. As many of us at EIU know, Michael does outstanding work.

We hope viewers/readers enjoy the interview with President Perry, and here's the schedule for the four parts of the interview.

• Tuesday, April 5: Writing and Making Connections
• Thursday, April 7: Living the Examined Life--Writing is the Key
• Tuesday, April 12: The Writing Process
• Thursday, April 14: The Power of Words

Creative Writing in the Classroom

Many people balk at creative writing. They see it as having few practical applications in the real world. Certainly, this stereotype is a by-product of creative writers themselves (and I am one of them), who talk about "art" more than they do "practice" or "practicality."

But creative writing can be used elsewhere. I was fortunate enough to mentor teach in a literature classroom, where creative writing featured prominently. The professor, Dr. Letitia Moffitt, used creative writing assignments to help students understand Shakespeare plays. These students were, for the most part, non-English majors, mostly sophomores, who had little previous experience with the Bard. By creating their own scenarios based off the plays (sometimes rooted in popular culture, such as The Lion King, Jersey Shore, and other programs), students were able to grasp the underlying thematic concepts inherent in the plays.

But creative writing can extend beyond English courses. In a mathematics course I had freshman year, our professor encouraged creative thinking in understanding advanced probability theorems. There was little of what we would traditionally call "writing" going on, but the process was still there; the idea was sound, and it helped us non-math students grasp these principles.

The same idea could easily be applied to other courses. Don't let the writing itself get in the way; often, it's the thought process behind the writing that is most useful. Use creative scenarios to get around difficult concepts. If students can be shown how abstract or difficult subjects relate to some aspect of their own life, they will better understand both the subject and why it's worth learning.

If you have any specific ideas or suggestions, please post them in the "Comments" section.

Practice Those Skills

Let me ask you a question. How many times have you heard that writing is a talent and that only the talented should perform it? I’m guessing more than once. I know I have. Well, I’m here to tell you that the idea of writing being for the talented is a bunch of malarkey. Writing is a skill. And like any skill, it must be practiced.

As Dan talked about in his post “Using Your Syllabi to Plan Your Writing Assignments,” it is essential to understand when all of your assignments are due. Having that information allows you the time to strategize your plan of attack. But that is only half the battle. Writing, as I said, must be practiced. It is incredibly difficult to write a larger length piece when you haven’t been writing throughout the semester. Trust me on that one.

For that reason, you need to make sure you are practicing your writing as much as possible. We are at the end of Week 6, meaning there are only 9 weeks left in the semester. That may seem like a lot of time, but it will go quickly, and if you haven’t been practicing your writing, those larger assignments are going to be even more difficult. But here’s the good news! There is still time to build up your writing stamina.

And I know what you’re thinking: “But Chris, what should I be writing? I don’t have the research I need to write that history paper, and I haven’t read that novel for that lit analysis paper.” Well that is a good question, and I thank you for asking it. Write anything. Putting words onto the page will help you. Write a poem. Write a short story. Write some fan fiction. Is that Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Han Solo fighting Dr. Robotnik? I think it is. Now it is up to you to create the story. There. I just gave you an awesome prompt. What? You don’t know who those people are? Well, looks like you have some research to do before you can write.

On a more academic side, you can write summaries for everything you read. If you read an article found on one of the library’s databases, then write a summary of that article. Writing a quick summary will do a few things: 1. It will ensure you understood what you read. 2. It gives you something to turn back to later on and remember what that article was about. 3. It gives you some material you might be able to pull into your actual paper.

As long as you are writing, you will be growing and learning. Write some fan fiction. Write a summary of an article. Take the extra step and write for class and yourself. So as we go into this weekend, take some time to do some writing. Practice those skills. You won’t regret it.