New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, newsletter

by Robert McEachern

Earlier in this summer, Bob McEachern (professor of professional writing at Southern Connecticut State University) told me how he’d completely rethought his Intermediate Composition class as a material re-enactment of “a” (not “the,” as he emphasizes) history of writing. I was completely taken with his approach. Because a good portion of it brought students through manuscript culture–and because we saw several papers at the 2024 NCS Congress address ways to bring medieval texts into composition classrooms (not to mention Krista Twu’s workshops!)–I asked him to write up a short description of the course for this newsletter. It seems exactly the sort of course many of us at teaching universities and colleges could adapt for our students, especially, as he reminds us, because we are still dealing with the effects of post2019 changes.

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It has been more than three years since the NCSPP blog has published a “Post2019” article, highlighting the changing conditions of teaching and learning in the academy created by the Covid-19 pandemic.  But the effects of those changes linger.  

My colleagues and I have been discussing these effects for a couple of years. We hope at the start of each semester that students will have “caught up,” but students’ attention spans are shorter.  Their abilities – and their interest – in reading and writing are waning; it is no secret that the Humanities have become even more undervalued in the last few years. Students’ reliance on technology, especially their phones, is both a cause and a symptom of their educational problems. The isolation that is created leads to endless, mindless scrolling. It is safe and it is comforting. The simultaneous arrival of generative AI programs fit perfectly for them, it seems – they promise to let someone or something else do the writing for them.  

Our conversations often come down to two general (and admittedly reductive) approaches we should take going forward. One says we need to resist the seduction of technology and return to the past, encouraging students to engage with paper texts and teach them to read and write all over again. The other advocates the opposite: we need to embrace the inevitability of technological progress and keep up with our students as they rapidly learn about technology like AI-assisted writing.   

I am no luddite. I won my university’s “Technological Teacher of the Year” award 10 years ago, and I regularly teach multiple sections of a course I designed called Writing for the Web.  But I also often find myself in the same position as my students, sucked into my own screens. I understand the comforts of technology, but also see firsthand its problems.  

I wanted to find some way of balancing the approaches that my colleagues and I were debating: some way of returning to the past while engaging with the future. 

I settled on a course on a history of writing. Not the history, but a history – my own idiosyncratic look at how writing technologies have changed over centuries. I wanted students to think about how writing was done physically in the past, when writing was a more sensory experience, and how writing gets done today. And in looking at the ways things have changed, I hoped we could examine what we have gained and what we have lost, as a culture and as individuals. 

I tried a course redesign last spring in my Intermediate Composition class, a 200 level class that meets a program requirement for Elementary Education majors, who made up about half of the class, and a writing-intensive requirement for everyone else. The class was set up so the past and the present were in dialogue. One week, we would explore a writing technology from the past. The next, we would look at its contemporary version. So we began with the world before writing: a class session with no writing at all. No laptops, phone, pens, pencils, or dry erase markers. Just 75 minutes of talking about writing and listening to one another. Students did better than I expected; only one reached for her phone, apologizing quickly. “Habit,” she said. For homework, they wrote a response to a discussion question on Blackboard, but they had to remember my oral prompt. 

The next week, we looked at the contemporary version of this experience: listening to a podcast (about the history of writing). Again, no writing, just listening, and then talking, as we discussed some of the issues that the podcast brought up, such as Socrates’ concerns about the effects of writing on memory.  

And so the semester went, with a historical writing practice followed by its contemporary equivalent. We looked at cave art from around the world, pictures telling stories without words. Then students tried to tell a story to the class using only wordless memes or emojis. 

Soon, students tried their hand (literally) at using quill pens. I had considered letting them cut the pens themselves, but in the interest of saving time and money, I bought feathers at a craft store and sharpened them myself with an x-acto knife, demonstrating in class after spending a couple of hours improving my technique. I bought bottles of ink, distributed quills, and we copied script from 18^th century copy books and from medieval texts. The next week, we discussed the ways that handwriting is meant to guarantee authenticity, and how handwriting may help to reinforce learning. We discussed the rhetoric of fonts and how Comic Sans can send a very different message from Time New Roman, which is different still from Aptos.  

We also made paper in class. We created pulp by recycling the paper they had used to practice scripts. I bought small mould and deckle frames and brought in five gallon buckets and towels. We got into a good rhythm; four groups of students made 77 pieces of 4 x 6 inch paper in an hour. 

Near the end of the semester, we talked about illuminated manuscripts and brought much of our sensory work together. We watched videos on vellum production (which made our own paper-making process seem so much easier) and on the art and science of writing text. We read about marginalia and compared the drawings and (sometimes flippant) marginal comments of medieval monks to the comment sections of YouTube videos, intertexts that become part of someone else’s work but which remain their own at the same time. Their final major assignment was a multimodal literacy autobiography, telling their own story as writers while incorporating images, video, drawings, and different font styles. 

Our final in-class discussion looked at generative AI and the good and bad that a program like ChatGPT can do for writers. We asked ChatGPT to give us instructions on how to draw SpongeBob SquarePants, and struggled when it became clear that the program had no idea what SpongeBob looked like. We asked it to respond to one of the class assignments and looked at the ways it hallucinated and invented facts, and talked about what the program might be useful for. And we looked back at history, at how people have long tried to find ways to get someone (or something) to do the writing for them, whether Roman slave stenographers or 18^th century Automata.  

For their final discussion post, I asked students to describe the best advice about writing they had ever received. It could come from a teacher, or a famous author, or advice from themselves that they learned through experience. Some of the advice they shared was very practical (“Write your introduction last”) and some was questionable without further explanation (“In writing arguments, there is no right or wrong”). 

In lieu of a final exam, I asked students to write out their advice, boiled down to fit on the 4  by 6 inch pieces of paper that the class had made, using quill pen and ink. Looking at their responses, two things surprised me. The first was how many students offered completely new advice, perhaps out of necessity, given the very limited space they had, or perhaps due to a few additional days of reflection. 

The second surprise was how much of the advice was simply human. It’s the kind of advice that Composition Studies scholars might call “Expressivist”:  

“Write from the heart.”  

“Find your voice – readers can see through a fraud.”  

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.” 

“Write how you want to be heard.”  

“Writing is powerful, so don’t make it powerless.”  

Student feedback was mostly positive, and most enjoyed the hands-on activities. A couple of students did find the history lessons less than interesting, and almost all of them continued to struggle with the kinds of difficult readings that many of our post-pandemic students wrestle with (such as Dennis Baron’s “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies”).  

I’m not so naive as to think my requiring them to write with a quill or dip their hands in watery pulp has changed their lives, or even their attitudes about technology. Still, given the writing advice they offered on the last day, I do have some hope that perhaps they gained something from the opportunity to think more carefully about the past and about what technology has caused us to gain and to lose. The sensory experiences in the class didn’t make them humanists; it reminded them that they already were. 

As attractive as technology can be, students still crave the connection that can sometimes be lost when mediated through technology. Maybe that connection is a memory of a good teacher’s advice, or maybe it’s a shared experience of “crafting” together in class. Perhaps they could use the reminder that those connections still exist.