Category Archives: Interviews

On Writing in the Fine Arts

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In October, in place of a mid-term exam, I asked my students in WR420/520 Writing Across the Curriculum to interview a professor in a discipline that interests them, asking how that professor teaches their majors to write. Students were also asked to make connections to readings in the course as they arose naturally. In this article, Julia Malye interviewed Lee Ann Garrison, Director of the School of Arts and Communication, about teaching writing in the fine arts. Julia Malye is a graduate student from France and author of the novels La fiancée de Tocqueville (2010), Thémoé (2013), and Les fantômes de Christopher Dorner (2016). She is working on her MFA in fiction here at OSU.

-Vicki Tolar Burton, WIC Director

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By Julia Malye, (MFA 2017, SWLF) SWLF GTA

The office of Lee Ann Garrison, director of the School of Arts and Communication, is covered with paintings. A first sign that words matter for this fine arts professor, who also writes poetry, is that she is “never ever not reading a novel.” I tell professor Garrison about the change one can witness in French art schools; when my mother graduated from Camondo (Paris) in 1976, her degree did not entail any writing component. Nowadays, Camondo students take mandatory writing classes from their first year on and all the way to graduation. Professor Garrison explains to me that she had a similar experience as she went to school around the same time as my mother did. So, how did this change occur over the years? Interestingly enough, Professor Garrison does not start with defining good writing; rather, she jumps right in with concrete examples of writing assignments.

She first mentions an exercise which heavily relies on writing – the goal being for students to familiarize themselves with describing art. Students go on a field trip to an art museum where they are asked to choose an art piece and sit in front of it for forty-five minutes. What do they see? They are encouraged to slow down and list everything they notice, without referring to their emotions or personal experience. This list will evolve as they include research about the artist and then turn it into a one-page essay that they bring to class. “They have to read out loud. If you can’t read it, it means it isn’t in your words,” adds Professor Garrison. I can’t help remembering Flaubert’s gueuloir (from gueuler, to yell), for whom reading in a loud voice was the ultimate test for good writing. Professor Garrison goes on explaining to me that the students do peer-review in class, where she encourages them to work on their word choice and to revisit the structure of their essays so that “the more important ideas are at the top of the page.” I am surprised to see how much she emphasizes revision, insisting on the fact that “the first draft isn’t the last draft.”

The activity shows student writing as a multi-faceted process, as they start with more informal writing – listing what they see – then move on to research, introducing others’ voices in their paper, and finally write down their thoughts before working as community in class to better structure and convey their ideas. I find it interesting that the activity is divided in multiple stages, so that the students can’t just sit and write their essay all at once. Between the moment they come up with the list and the moment they do research, they gain some perspective on what they have written – and one could say the same about the first and last draft of their essay. This activity invites the students to see writing as a process, which echoes Herrington’s conception of writing, as a “discovery process” (127). Hence, this first assignment deconstructs the idea of an immediate perfection, of a final product – something that the students will probably apply to their own artwork, as they will go on polishing what they have first produced.

Professor Garrison mentions another writing assignment, the artist statement that seniors need to present at the gallery as they exhibit their final work. Since they read it out loud in front of the public, I take the opportunity to ask her about audience – to what extent she emphasizes rhetorical awareness to her students. Her response is immediate: the students are taught about and familiarized with different audiences. The artist statement is not only addressed to faculty members, but also to students’ peers, who have witnessed the evolution of the project. Other assignments allow students to target wider audiences; for example, Professor Garrison’s husband, a professor and art critic, gives the students the opportunity to polish one of their articles and publish it on an online student magazine, The Corvallis Review. If they want to, he also offers to work some more on their writing, so that it could eventually be published in an art magazine. Once again, revision is emphasized as a key part of the writing process; the students come to realize that by keeping in mind who their readers are, they will need to write differently. It isn’t about “doing school” anymore, either. Rather, they are stepping into the world of art, jumping into a broader conversation and adding their personal insights on a defined topic.

Students majoring in fine arts must be able to write about other artists in order to build a discourse around their own artistic product. Now that I have a better idea of what students’ writing goals are in this discipline, I ask Professor Garrison to define what “good writing” means to her and her colleagues. I share with her Chris Thaiss’s idea that defining good writing in one’s own discipline is one of the main areas of difficulty for teachers of writing in the majors. She first mentions efficiency and clarity, before adding that it should engage the reader, coming full circle with this focus on rhetorical awareness. One of these elements surprises me, as it hasn’t been discussed much in our articles: good writing in fine arts must be beautiful. And what could be more natural for a discipline with a focal point on aesthetics? Professor Garrison goes further, illustrating her point: “I used to teach a class with 350 students. I would tell them ‘If I’ve already read 328 papers and the 329th one is beautifully written, then I will forget about the number of essays I had to grade.’”

Then, what kind of common mistakes would remind her of the crushing number of papers she has to give feedback on? Considering her previous comment on “beautiful writing” (and a part of me wonders how one would clearly define that), it isn’t a surprise when she mentions poor sentence structure and students starting with clichés like “I feel this” or “it caught my eye” rather than jumping right into their own analysis. Professor Garrison adds: “Then there is the paragraph issue, students writing in one block.” This last comment struck me as perhaps particular to fine arts students, since it goes back to something which is visual before anything else, and therefore struck the artist’s eye: an essay with only one paragraph feels rushed and doesn’t invite readers to immerse themselves in the text. Next I ask what kind of strategies she applies to help her students better organize their thoughts. Professor Garrison goes back to the first activity she mentioned, and the peer-review work in class where the students are invited to tackle those sentence-level issues and move around paragraphs in order to clearly structure their ideas. She also mentions the rubric that she hands out for the writing assignment; to her, the grading guide is more important for the student as they are working on the assignment than after.

Professor Garrison is a firm believer in the general education that students need beside their major. She considers that implementing more writing components at Oregon State University has been successful. Still, there seems to be room for improvement, when she recalls this one student who once had the courage to tell her about the research paper they had to work on: “You know you keep on telling us that it’s a short paper. Only 2000 words. We’ve never written that much before.” This student was a senior at the time.

I asked Professor Garrison if she could compare how writing is included in the OSU curriculum with other universities where she had previously taught. Professor Garrison tells me about another concern faculty members have; she remembers a former colleague confiding in her, “I can’t teach writing, I’m a painter.” To which she replied: “You’re a college professor and you can.” This seems extremely interesting to me, this idea that the reticence of certain faculty members can be hiding anxiety – the feeling that they are not expert in this field, that when it comes to writing they don’t have the comfort one has in their own discipline. I couldn’t help thinking about Sommers and Saltz, who argued that the students who would grow as writers would be the ones who accept to be novices again, who “discover they can ‘give and get’ something through writing” (304). This idea could also be applied to professors. How to help them gain confidence in teaching writing, how could one convince them of the importance to be novice in this field? If faculty members attend WIC workshops, they have an opportunity to discuss together the issues they face and if they are the ones coming up with solutions, then they remain the experts in their field, which might help them deal with the anxiety expressed by Professor Garrison’s painter colleague.

I have one last question for Professor Garrison. Talking to a fine arts professor, I can’t help remembering where Thaiss wonders if, considering the democratization of technologies, one should expand the definition of writing to “a greater variety of ‘written products’” such as “visuals-and-text magazines, radio, television, CDs, live theater, Web sites, MOOs” (91). When I mention this idea, Professor Garrison smiles. The answer is yes; to her, writing, just like drawing or painting is about communicating, conveying a message. “When I write a poem or when I paint, I’m commenting on my time.” With such a conception of writing, it is no wonder that Lee Ann Garrison is so involved in incorporating writing component in her course. One can only hope that she convinces more painters that they know how to write, and not only with their brush.

 

Works Cited

Herrington, Anne J. “Writing to Learn: Writing Across the Disciplines.” Zawacki and Rogers, pp. 118-127.

Sommers, Nancy, and Laura Saltz. “The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year.” Zawacki and Rogers, pp. 290-309.

Thaiss, Christopher. “Theory in WAC: Where Have We Been, Where Are We Going.” Zawacki and Rogers, pp. 85-99.

David Brin: From Sci Fi to Science/Humanities Collaborations

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By Claire Roth (MA 2017), WIC GTA

Scientist and best-selling science fiction author David Brin visited Oregon State’s campus in the beginning of October, an event made possible by the collaborative project “SPARK: Arts + Science @ OSU.” Brin gave a well-attended lecture open to the Corvallis community, visited classes and labs on campus, and conducted a small workshop and interdisciplinary conversation about sci-fi prototyping, all in the short time he spent with us. Brin talked enthusiastically about the potential for writing collaboration between the sciences and the humanities. His ideas could have an exciting impact on Oregon State’s writing culture.

To understand the potential for Brin’s ideas to create more collaborative writing projects on campus, I asked two of our faculty, Dr. Raymond Malewitz and Dr. Bill Smart, to comment on Brin’s lecture and workshop.

Raymond Malewitz is an assistant professor in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film and is the director of the MA program in English. His research and writing projects primarily focus on the intersections between literature, science, environmental concerns, and material culture. Dr. Malewitz introduced David Brin before his lecture titled “Adaptations: Storytelling in Novels and Film.”

Bill Smart is an associate professor in the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering. His research in robotics aims primarily at the intersection between humans and robots. He also does work in machine learning with an emphasis on strategies for training long-term robot actions. Dr. Smart was one of the coordinators and facilitators of David Brin’s workshop on sci-fi prototyping.
 

Question 1: David Brin made the comment that if a person can prove their chops, then they can invade other fields. Do you ever find yourself “invading” other fields during your research? If so, which fields did you find most surprising or unexpected?

Malewitz: “As a scholar of science and lit, I invade fields all the time, which has led to some fascinating conversations with people far removed from English lit.  Last year, I met with a veterinary scientist at OSU to discuss the surveillance of zoonotic diseases (diseases that spread between animals and humans).  During the conversation, we both reflected on the significance of the fact that reverse zoonoses (humans infecting animals) are poorly represented in lit and culture, which may reflect upon our own biases regarding our status within the animal kingdom.”

Smart: “All the time.  Since I work in robotics, I’m forced to dabble in a lot of other fields to get things working.  I’m a computer scientist by training, but I dip into mechanical engineering, mathematics, psychology, art, and a number of other fields in the course of my research.  None of this is particularly deep, but I do get the chance to talk to and collaborate with domain experts in all of these areas.  I find psychology the most unexpected, since it’s the field that I know least about.  It’s also the one where I think that I learn the most, probably because of the excellent set of collaborators that I work with.”

Question 2: Brin described science fiction writing as “speculative history,” then connected the idea to the workshop by calling it an exercise in “speculative technology.” To what extent does speculation appear in your field? What kinds of speculative work do you find yourself doing?

Malewitz: “Speculative fiction is near and dear to me.  In recent articles, I’ve written about how emerging and future technologies affect human behavior and our sense of orientation within the world—something that fiction can do quite well.  For example, I’ve become interested in the ways that enormous clean energy projects—wind and solar farms, etc.—affect our understanding of regionalism, which in American literature tends to be preoccupied with natural rather than artificial elements of the landscape.  I’ve also written about a great recent novel by Gary Shteyngart called Super Sad True Love Story, which speculates on the future (or current) effects of social media on politics.”

Smart: “I think that, in robotics, you [speculate] all the time.  You have to imagine how these new things will change our lives, and how they will integrate with the way we do things now.  Part of that is doing what-if experiments with technology, and then trying to close the gap between what we can do now and the scenario the what-if creates.  My hunch is that a lot of research proceeds in this way.”

Question 3: One of the results of our time with David Brin is a possibility for collaborative projects between writers, scientists, and engineers here at Oregon State. What do you think your field could gain from this collaborative relationship? What kinds of projects would you hope to see evolve?

Malewitz: “Some great collaborative possibilities are starting to emerge at OSU under the umbrella category of “Environmental Humanities,” which attempts to represent the dynamic features of our environment in ways similar to the manner by which historians, literary scholars, and philosophers represent human activity.  This fusion works quite nicely when applied to things that fall between the categories of the social and natural worlds, including anthropogenic climate change, stem cell research, and artificial modes of human and nonhuman reproduction.”

Smart: “I’d really like to see a science fiction prototyping group emerge here on campus.  A group of people familiar with the technologies we use (particularly in robotics, which is my thing), who write short, near-future speculative fiction to frame the sorts of technological and ethical questions that we should be thinking about today.  Ideally this group would comprise both writers and technologists, since getting us to think critically about our technology is an important part of the process.”

Most of our WIC Program focuses on writing as it appears in our separate disciplines. David Brin’s visit and the enthusiasm of both Dr. Malewitz and Dr. Smart prove there is something to be said for writing across disciplines as well. We work hard to prepare students to write well during their professional lives. It’s also worthwhile to remind students while they are here that they have an opportunity for collaboration unique to college life. Where else but a college campus is it so convenient to explore writing with someone outside your discipline? My hope for our campus is to see the collaborative projects described above come to life as our writing culture at Oregon State continues to grow.

Writing Advice from a Recent Public Health Grad

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By WIC Team

For each spring WIC newsletter, we ask undergraduates who have won a WIC Culture of Writing Award to share writing advice with students following in their major. From time to time we also ask past winners who are several years out of OSU to tell us about writing in the workplace. Claire Ranit, graduate from the College of Public Health and Human Sciences, won a Culture of Writing Award in 2012 for her paper titled “The Interplay of Accountable Care Organizations and Antitrust Regulations.” We asked Claire several questions about where she is now and what writing advice she would give fellow writers.

Ranit explained, “Currently I have my own healthcare consulting business with one large grant-based, multi-year contract as a Project Director and a few other small contracts intermittently.  My main work focuses on teaching a three county community on ACEs, Trauma Theory, and Trauma Informed Care. Writing is required daily in my role as Project Director including but not limited to strategic plan development, proposal development, and grant proposals.”

“My advice to undergraduates in the College of Public Health is to start as early as possible in the term on any writing projects.  Get an outline together in the first couple weeks of the course and start drafting work.  Most instructors are willing to look over multiple iterations of a written work so by the end of the term there is no need to cram and you can be confident in receiving a high grade on your work.”

“Having learned how to write proposals would have been beneficial in the program, especially in the healthcare field.  A lot of graduates work with doctors on some level and it’s important to be able to present the whole picture succinctly.  Early on I adopted the SBAR (situation, background, assessment, recommendation) framework and expanded on details where needed.”

We want to thank Ranit for her excellent advice and encourage our WIC faculty to begin watching for student papers of distinction. Details on nominating student papers for 2017 WIC Culture of Writing Awards will appear in our Winter 2017 Newsletter.

Teaching Marine Biology Writing in the Field: An Interview with Sally Hacker

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By Natalie Saleh, (MA 2016, SWLF) WIC Intern

Sally Hacker is a community ecologist and professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at Oregon State University. Among other research and teaching responsibilities, Dr. Hacker developed and co-instructs a 15-credit marine biology WIC course (BI 450 Marine Biology), which is offered every spring at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon. Admission to BI 450 Marine Biology is competitive; students who are accepted into the course live in Newport for the term and take only this one class. In the following excerpts from a longer interview with WIC program intern Natalie Salah, Dr. Hacker discusses her background as a community ecologist, the structure of BI 450, and the kinds of writing students do in this course.

 

Natalie Saleh: Can you give a brief explanation of what you do as a community ecologist?

Sally Hacker: As a marine community ecologist, I look at how species interact with one another in natural systems on the coast. My current research focuses on the role of species interactions and coastal oceanography in structuring coastal ecosystems including rocky shores, estuaries, and sand dunes. In other words, I study how the physical forces from the ocean influence the ecology on the shoreline.

NS: What inspired you to study community ecology?

SH: I was inspired when I was an undergraduate at the University of Washington. I was really interested in marine biology and ended up going out to Friday Harbor Marine Labs up in the San Juan Islands. I really liked studying animals and working in coastal habitats and being outside. I fell in love with community ecology and ended up going on to graduate school and choosing it as my life’s work.

NS: How long have you been at Oregon State?

SH: I have been here for 11 years. Before coming to OSU, I was a faculty member at Washington State University in Vancouver, Washington.

NS: Can you tell me about the WIC course you teach?

Spring 2015 BI 450 students at the top of Cascade Head near Lincoln City, Oregon.
Spring 2015 BI 450 students at the top of Cascade Head near Lincoln City, Oregon.

SH: Marine Biology (BI 450) is a WIC class where students spend the term at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. The class is divided into six one- to two-week sections, which focus on different topics and are taught by different faculty. The topics covered in the course are marine invertebrates, marine fishes, marine algae, community ecology, marine conservation, and a final research project of the students’ choosing. I teach the first two weeks, which focuses on marine invertebrates, and the last two weeks, which focuses on the final project.

In the last two weeks, the students take all the knowledge they have gained during the prior eight weeks to design their own research project. The projects involve some kind of research outside in the field or inside the laboratory. The students collect data, and then they write a scientific paper based on that data. Then they present their projects to the class, and we invite everyone from Hatfield to come for their presentations.

NS: What does the average day look like for students in BI 450?

SH: Oh, it’s really long. It depends, but we are often in the field by 6 a.m, if that is when the low tides are. Fieldwork might include walking around, identifying species, collecting some of them to bring back to the lab, taking notes. We might spend two or three hours out there.

The rest of the day usually includes a couple of lectures and a few hours of lab work. Sometimes at night, there are special lectures. We will have somebody come in and talk about their work or their research or about what it’s like to be in graduate school. During the first week, we schedule a lot of evening activities so that people can get to know each other.

The course instructors are always beat by the end of our two weeks of teaching. We’re basically working all day long, and there’s no time to do anything other than be part of that teaching experience. But after our two weeks, the students are still there. They love it, but it’s pretty intense. They’re really devoting ten weeks of their life to that class, away from Corvallis, not being around their friends. But most people who do it say it’s the best class they ever took at OSU.

NS: What kinds of writing do students do in BI 450?

“The students always have notebooks out in the field too…writing their observations down on paper can help quite a bit in learning about the species.”

SH: They do all kinds of writing, but the major formal assignment is a scientific paper about their final project. To do that, we teach them how to write different parts of the paper in each section of the course, so by the time they actually write their papers they know what they are doing.

We also have them write an op-ed in the conservation section of the course, about a topic they are interested in. They have to take a side and write an opinion about the topic. This is a really different writing style than scientific writing, so it gets them out of their comfort zone.

We have a blog for this course, and students are responsible every week for writing a blog post in which they reflect on what happened that week. It is informal writing; the only requirement is that they write about their experiences in the course, try to spell things correctly, and make sure it is PG-13!The blog is really fun for the professors too, because you can find out what the students are up to in the sections you aren’t teaching.

The course involves a lot of memorization of species names. To help with this, one instructor has the students make ID cards. She gives them a certain group of marine algae that they have to work with, and then they have to teach the other students about that group of algae, using the ID cards.

The students always have notebooks out in the field to record their observations. Just taking notes is a skill, especially when it’s pouring down rain. Taking the time to observe something about a given species and write their observations down on paper can help quite a bit in learning about the species.

NS: Going back to the formal writing assignment, can you give some examples of final projects students have done?

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BI 450 students also keep journals where they draw and write about species they encounter during their fieldwork.

SH: They do all kinds of projects. The Hatfield visitors’ center has a resident octopus living in one of the tanks. It is really popular. Students have done projects looking at how octopuses find and determine whether something is prey. For example, one project involved trying to trick an octopus with a plastic crab versus a real crab to see if the octopus can detect which is which. The octopus of course picks the real crab, because octopuses are really smart.

Other students have investigated limpet feeding or fish foraging behavior in the intertidal zone. Also there are a lot of projects looking at crabs—where they live, their habitat preferences, and how they avoid being eaten. And there have been projects about the behavior of mother and baby seals. Students will look at harbor seals and examine how often the baby seals feed. Some students have looked at whether seals are scared by boats or are disturbed by people.

NS: What advantages do you see about writing the scientific paper in such a condensed time frame?

SH: I think it gives students a sense of accomplishment to be able to complete a research project from start to finish in two weeks. It’s a culminating project, pulling from all they have learned over the prior eight weeks of the course about how to do research, write a research paper, and give a talk. My experience is that they are excited to finally sit down and write their own paper on the discoveries they have made. All the preparation they have had for that moment unleashes a sense of independence and accomplishment that is great to see as a professor.

NS: In what ways do students help each other on the final project?

SH: They can work in groups of up to three (some do work alone though) and they help each other with all aspects of the project from writing the proposal to collecting data to analyzing their data to reading each other’s work. But they are all responsible for their own papers in the end.

NS: How do you think the genres that aren’t typical in science fields, like the blogs, help students learn the course concepts?

SH: I think it helps them a lot, because they are not pressured by getting the writing right. They are just thinking about communicating something to somebody else.

NS: What do you think is the main advantage of taking the 15-credit marine biology course as opposed to more traditional classes at OSU?

SH: What people have told me is that they benefit from being immersed in marine biology all the time. The students don’t have anything else to think about but this class. The class is also split up into sections, and once a section is done, it’s done. I think students quickly realize that that’s a really good way to learn, because they are not thinking about multiple topics and trying to get many different projects done at the same time.

They also meet so many people at the marine lab. There are many people who work for the state and the federal agencies, so students get to meet people who can help them potentially get a job, further their career, or help with their research. It really benefits the students once they leave OSU.

To learn more about what students are doing at the Hatfield Marine Science Center, read the BI 450 Marine Biology blog here: http://www.marinebio450.blogspot.com/