Bih-shia Huang

Dr. Susanmarie Harrington

Engl 5363
back to contemporary issues in writing assessmentpage

Introduction

Peter Elbow is a contemporary theorist who advocates expressionism in pedagogy and composition. He is the most disputed but respectable person. He is also a prolific author. His works, published from time to time, mostly concentrate on composition and assessment. Although he seems to repeat his ideas of composition and assessment in most of his articles, he does not lose his charm and eloquence in persuading readers to believe what he believes. Although expressionism, in practice, like other theories, has something unfeasible, it still provides teachers and students with an alternative to get out of the plights that the conventional methods create. The following summaries from some of his articles are chronologically arranged in order to demonstrate the development of Elbow's ideas in teaching writing and evaluating. At the onset, his ideas appeared mature but were not fixed in definite terms; however, later on, readers are able to see and attain the affirmative ideas and theories that Elbow suggests. His main ideas and theories are: freewriting, less ranking (or grading) and more evaluating, more writing, contract grading, portfolios, and liking, all of which may arouse some readers' interest in student-centered pedagogy. From the following annotations, I hope that readers may get a rough picture of his ideas in composition and assessment.

Elbow, Peter. Embracing Contraries: Trustworthiness in Evaluation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.

Elbow suggests, in the section of this book, that three general strategies for increasing the trustworthiness of grades and comments. First, breaking down into parts the performance to be evaluated. It is not surprising that any piece of writing will more than likely get the full range of grades. It would be better that readers agree remarkably better if readers grade features (ideas, organization, mechanics, and so forth) of each of the pieces of writing. Competence-based education and narrative evaluations are ways to increase the trustworthiness of evaluation by breaking down the knowledge or skills into parts. Second, using more than one graders will increase the trustworthiness of evaluation. Here the term of portfolio first appears in his article. The above two methods are most helpful with measurement. Last, using "movies of the reader's mind" whose purposes are to tell students the truth and ground teachers' reactions in specific details and accurate observations. This last method is related to comments. Finally, Elbow concludes that evaluation includes two activities: measurement (or grading or ranking) and commentary (or feedback).

I think this article represents his early ideas of evaluation. The methods he suggested were embryonic as compared to the methods he proposes right now. I can see that the term of portfolios emerges not as a fad but as a necessity at that time and extends up to the present.

Elbow, Peter. Nothing Begins with N: Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting. Ed. Pat Belanoff, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl I. Fontaine. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

Elbow regards freewriting as a warm-up activity towards other more complicated activities. He thinks that freewriting is something at the center of a writer and a teacher. He has several reasons for freewriting. First, freewriting is so incoherent that it relieves the burdens that would undermine students' writing. Second, unfocused exploring is his main use of freewriting. True freewriting is a companionable, social activity which contradicts the association of writing with isolation. There are two kinds of freewriting: private (writing for self), and public(sharing with others). Freewriting invites the mind to react actively. It can lead to a certain experience of writing or kind of writing process. Freewriting establishes a directness of tone, sound, style, and diction that helps Elbow emulate in his careful revising. Freewriting involves a sense of letting go and a matter of translation. It functions ambivalent ways of pouring oneself into one's discourse and popping oneself out of it. In his conclusion, Elbow admits that freewriting has given him a profoundly different experience of and relationship to writing.

This article, unlike the other articles that Elbow publishes, is written in an descriptive and expressive way. The whole article is centered in the theme of "freewriting." It describes what benefits freewriting can contribute to writing. I don't know whether freewriting can be useful to every student in the writing class even though I admire its merits.

Elbow, Peter. "Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshmen and

Colleagues." College English 53 (1991): 135-55.

Elbow indicates that there is something good about academic discourse: learning, intelligence, sophistication, but there is something about academic discourse which he seems to dislike: it is the discourse that academics use when they publish for other academics. He objects to the idea of handing over the freshman writing course entirely to academic discourse. He gives three reasons for this: First, very few of our students will ever have to write academic discourse after college. Students can be granted to have a free choice of writing. He thinks that the best test of a writing course is whether it makes students more likely to use writing in their lives. Second, a kind of nonacademic discourse is particularly important to teach. That is the discourse rendering experience rather than explaining it. The discourse that renders often yields important new cognitive insights. Third, nonacademic discourse is necessary for helping students produce good academic discourse. The use of academic discourse often indicates a lack of true understanding. He argues that the teacher can't teach academic discourse because there is no such thing to teach. The teacher knows little or nothing about other kinds of discourse except his or her own discourse; therefore, he or she is not qualified to teach most kinds of academic discourse. People see academic discourse as a medium whose conventions tend to imply disinterested impersonality and detachment. Academic discourse tries to focus on the argument, reasons, and the claim. It also leads to a somewhat formal language. Students are learning better when academic discourse is separated from its linguistic and stylistic conventions. In the end, he suggests that students should master some particular, well-defined sort of discourse rather than confining to academic one. Thus, students are able to develop an awareness of and pleasure in the various competing discourses that make up their own.

I think that the best way to introduce students to academic discourse is to have them familiarize nonacademic discourse first. As they are used to putting their thoughts and experiences with their own language in writing, they are ready for being inculcated the conventions of academic discourse. When writing for academic discourse, they won't just mimic surface stylistic features instead of elaborating organic contents.

Elbow, Peter. "Some Thoughts on Expressive Discourse: A Review Essay." Journal of Advanced Composition 11.1 (1991): 83-94.

In this review essay, Elbow opposes Jeanette Harris' exclusion of expressive discourse as a category. He is uncomfortable with her aversion to expressionists. He concludes that her book has two different arguments or projects: the first argument is against the term "expressive discourse," and the second is against the thing itself; the first is theoretical and has to do with how we describe and classify discourse, and the second is practical and pedagogical. He points out that she notes two threats. The first threat is that many teachers or theorists think expressive discourse is superior to other kinds of discourse. Nevertheless, he denies any kind of discourse better or worse than others. He indicates that she sees a second danger in which expressive discourse is taking over the teaching of writing and many teachers and theorists want students to write about personal experiences, not writing about information, data, or ideas. He makes a sarcastic on her second fear. He says that he is more fearful of the anti-expressive movement taking over the world. He disagrees with her rejecting the intention of writing for the self. In order to defend his expressionism, he questions some points she has made. In the end, however, he makes a few good comments on her advocacy of granting writing freedom to students and having them enjoy the text rather than just study or master it in literature classes.

Perhaps Harris makes strong criticism against expressive discourse; nevertheless, she has her own stance. On the other hand, Elbow, in his review essay, defend expressive discourse by pointing out the wrong concepts of expressive discourse she has.

Elbow, Peter. "Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment." College English 55.2 (1993): 187-206.

Elbow compares ranking with evaluating by saying that ranking is the act of judging one's performance with a single, holistic score, and that evaluating is the act of judging one's performance with constructive suggestions. He suggests that we should have less ranking and more evaluating. He sees three problems with ranking: First, the reliability in ranking is questionable. The same paper is given to a set of readers and it comes out with different grades. Second, ranking or grading is uncommunicative. Grades and holistic scores don't provide any information or clues about what and why readers approve or disapprove of. Third, ranking leads students to pay more attention to scores rather than learning and comments that teachers have written. Elbow proposes some ways in which he uses less ranking and more evaluating in teaching. Portfolios are the first option. While satisfying the need for grades by students and institutions, at the same time teachers can put some comments on portfolios. The second option is to use two bottom-line grades: H and U for "Honor" and "Unsatisfactory." These holistic judgments do not give students' anxiety about not getting grades and do not seem arbitrary and questionable as most grades. Using an analytic grid for evaluating and commenting on students' paper is the third option. This option can satisfy the student's hunger for ranking but still doesn't provide conventional grades on individual papers. Having students share their writing with each other both orally and through frequent publication in class magazines is another good option. It gives the best reward and motivation for writing. Contract grading is the last option. Students will be given a promise that if they do all the things listed by teachers they are guaranteed a certain final grade. Elbow admits that evaluation has limits or problems that include unfairness and unreliability from different readers and contexts and consumption of more time and tasks. Elbow concludes that evaluation-free zone is the best part of his teaching. Freewriting and quickwrites or sketches are the main activities in the principle of evaluation-free zone. He thinks that liking students' writing is the most important incentive in evaluation and good writing teachers like students' writing. How do teachers increase the chances of liking students' writing? He offers three ways: (a) asking for lots of private writing and merely shared writing, (b) having students share lots of writing with each other, (c) increasing the chances of liking their writing when teachers get better at finding what is good and learn to praise it, (d) getting to know students a bit as people, (e) the more teachers show themselves to students, the easier it is to like them and their writing, (f) and helping teachers learn to like their own writing. In the end, he implies that liking can get along with better evaluation.

This article, I think, demonstrates the most concrete ideas that Elbow has ever elaborated. We can get a rough picture of what and how Elbow thinks a good assessment in students' writing. This article is a miniature of his entire pieces of writing.

Elbow, Peter. "The Uses of Binary Thinking." Journal of Advanced Composition 13.1 (1993): 51-78.

In recent years, strong criticism against binary thinking which sees things in terms of opposites has been raised. Binary thinking sometimes favors one over the other. That is: One side is privileged. On the other hand, deconstruction seeks to balance the polar oppositions. It doesn't favor either the thesis or antithesis but tries to eliminate difference--to reach situations of balance, irresolution, nonclosure, nonconsensus, nonwinning. However, Elbow focuses in this paper on pairs and binary thinking. He applies this balancing kind of binary thinking to three examples: writing, teaching, and thinking/learning. In writing, he categorizes skills in writing into generating and criticizing which represent choices. In the process of writing, he thinks that we may be generating a great deal or not very much, and that at the same time we may be criticizing a great deal or not much. When writing goes badly, we are tied by trying to be generative and critical at the same time. In teaching, as teachers, we may play roles as ally and adversary who help students learn better and criticize what is wrong and reject what is unsatisfactory. In thinking and learning, we need skill both at doubting even what looks right, and at believing even what looks crazy or alien. In these three categories, Elbow is arguing the benefits of one kind of binary thinking for understanding writing, teaching, and thinking: emphasizing dichotomies but holding them unresolved, giving equal affirmation to both sides. In other words, both sides are affirmed equally, not a compromise but rather to push for extremity in both directions, and for resisting attempts at priority or hegemony by either side. In order to illustrate his views of binary thinking, he gives examples of teaching versus research, form versus content, reading versus writing.

I think that dichotomies exist no matter whether they are external or internal. People tend to stand on the side where they think is right; however, most of the time there is no right or wrong but either side is right. If someone insists on his or her priority, conflicts may occur. The primary point that Elbow makes is to respect differences while differentiating them.

Elbow, Peter, and Kathleen Blake Yancey. "On the Nature of Holistic Scoring: An

Inquiry Composed on Email." Assessing Writing 1.1 (1994): 91-107.

In this article, Elbow has a dialogue with Kathleen Blake Yancey through email. The following viewpoints mostly belong to Elbow's. Reading is socially constructed. Divergence and convergence are the two opposite skills that well-educated readers have to develop. Divergence is a skill that intelligent readers see something that others haven't seen. On the other hand, these readers who are trained to read divergently have to adjust their reading direction to divergence because they have to reach agreement which is necessary for holistic scoring. It is this "training" of readers that yields reader reliability; however, how these readers actually read or value these texts is unknown, and thus the student's writing performance is also unattainable. The assessment enterprise is not connected with the teaching enterprise and with the reading enterprise. Reading the student's writing is not what normal reading is because it involves communal agreement. Raters are not readers generally, but a select group of readers. Even standards are set by the group, they still lose minority voices. All the pressure and focus are on convergent reading; nevertheless, divergent readings get less attention. Training readers has two directions: divergence and convergence. Some teachers tend to ask students to converge on what they or certain authorities read in the text, while others tend to give students free will of creating new, strange, and interesting meaning in the text. Similarly, professionals are also trained both to converge and diverge. But when we are trained as readers for assessment, we are confined to a boundary in which no reading is allowed to be different from others'. Elbow suggests that good reading is not fallen into these extreme categories. That is: not to converge nor diverge but simply to read carefully and pay attention to and respect what actually happens when we read. Empirical reading tends to favor convergence over divergence. We can let readers read empirically and simply see where they agree on weak or unsatisfactory performances and where they agree on excellence or honors. This might be called a kind of "minimal holistic scoring." Empirical reading is also the most useful for writers. Elbow is troubled by holistic scoring that measures a complex performance like writing with a quantitative, one-dimensional score. He asserts that student writing is not improved by holistic scoring and assessment is not part of teaching.

I am enlightened with the terms of reading skills--divergence and convergence--which I have never thought before. Indeed, reading is fallen in the continuum of divergence and convergence. Perhaps Elbow is right about good reading which should be located in the middle way of the continuum.

Elbow, Peter. "Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals." College Composition and Communication 46.1 (1995): 72-83.

Elbow explores the conflict between the role of writer and that of academic in a first year writing class. It is his wishes that students in the first year writing class can be accustomed to both roles comfortably. In other words, the first year students can feel themselves as writers as well as feel themselves as academics. Even though he thinks that these are idealistic goals, he still regard them as reasonable goals for his teaching. Nevertheless, he is bothered by the conflict between these goals. In this article, it seems that Elbow prefers the role of writer to the role of academic in the first year writing class. He urges the first years students to see themselves as writers, and the teacher should publish and read their own writing. It helps students begin to experience themselves as members of a community of writers. He indicates that in the traditional convention, writing is always subservient to reading. He would like to changing this unequal situation by assigning writing as the center of teaching to at least one course. He suggests that writers (students) need some time away from the imperious demand of readers (the academic) and think about themselves. He believes in students' inner knowledge more than they can put into words because language is not a clear and neutral medium. He invites the first year students to be self-absorbed and see themselves at the center of the discourse. The rationale is based on the assumption that students cannot be good writers unless they have a free choice of writing and a sense of pride, self-absorption, and even arrogance.

In the English academics including professors and graduate students, I think there is few or no conflict between the role of writer and that of academics. By contrast, most students, especially the first year students do not inhabit themselves in the discourse of academics. In stead of pressing them to fit in the discourse promptly, it is better for students to have somewhat a free choice of writing and a sense of pride, self-absorption and even arrogance when they write.

Elbow, Peter. "Taking Time Out from Grading and Evaluating While Working in a Conventional System." Assessing Writing 4.1 (1997): 5-27.

Elbow differentiates grading and evaluation by pointing out that grading gives explicit, simple, and quantitative symbols while evaluation includes a much wider spectrum of activities and modes. Grading is a small subset of evaluation. He seems to reject the grading system and support narrative evaluations. Freewriting is a good example of nongraded writing which allows students to write and not to worry about how the teacher will evaluate it. Nongraded writing gets more interesting before the teacher has to do any grading. The main essence of nongraded writing is to ask students to write freely and to neglect the teacher's presence. Elbow lists two methods--portfolios and contracts for a grade--as good evaluation tools. He doesn't explore portfolios at length; however, he explains in detail about contract grading in this article. Contract grading doesn't escape from the conventional grading, but it minimizes the negative effect of traditional grading. The teacher and students make a contract in which students are asked not to worry about their grades and to concentrate on revising their papers until they are satisfied with their writing and get their ideal grades. He decries that the conventional grading makes students feel a bit mystified, helpless and paranoid about what they will get for the course. He indicates that contract grading changes the power relationship between the teacher and students. He argues that contract grading does not minimize evaluation; on the contrary, it highlight evaluation by separating it from grading. One of the reasons he uses contract grading is to avoid having arguments with students about their grades. Nevertheless, he admits that full power will still be in the teacher's hands.

Perhaps contract grading can work well in some cases: students will strive for grades they think are desirable; nevertheless, what if students who have no motivation to improve their writing ability? Some students are happy with getting "C" which is enough for them to finish their courses. Do they need to struggle for better grades? I have no idea.

Elbow, Peter. "Grading Writing: Changing Grading While Working with Grades." The Theory and Practice of Grading Writing. Ed. Frances Zak, and Christopher C. Weaver. State University of New York P, 1998.

Elbow thinks that grading is not natural, and advocates that teacher can step outside of grading for certain period of time. As usual, he proposes freewriting and portfolios to temporarily avoid the suppression of the traditional grading. Freewriting gives us ten-minute time out. Portfolios allow teachers to write comments and students to revise before grades are finalized. Liking and loving can prevent judging students' papers negatively even though their writing is poor. Again he indicates the weaknesses of the traditional grading. He assigns the untrustworthy grading as verticality. In this article, he suggests two ways to deal with this unrelenting verticality: (1) reduce it by using fewer grades--what he calls "minimal grading"; (2) add a bit of the horizontal dimension by using criteria. Fewer grades mean fewer grading levels which avoid untrustworthy and unfair results, resentment and disputation, a pecking order culture, and more work for teachers. Indeed, there are two intertwined problems that the restricted use of the grading scale involves: grade inflation and grade meaninglessness. Criteria do carry information about the features of writing that influence teachers' judgments. The simplest criteria are the traditional ad commonly used pair, form and content. By using criteria, teachers can make grades carry much more information and meaning. Elbow points out that the use of criteria has an extra benefit of enhancing the possibilities of productive self-evaluation.

I wonder if Elbow incorporates minimal grading and criteria into portfolios because portfolios possess the features of carrying comments and suggestions that criteria have and the postponement of grading which is not the same as but similar to minimal grading.