JAC Volume 9

The Contemporary Writing Curriculum is one of several recent reassessments of composition instruction. Roland Huff and Charles R. Kline thoroughly document research drawn chiefly from the last two decades, but they do not attempt as comprehensive an overview of research as George Hillocks’ Research on Written Composition. While their emphasis is on the collaborative classroom, they do not focus strictly on writing groups, as does Anne Gere’s 1987 study, which considers writing groups from historical, sociological, and linguistic perspectives. Gere advances no single methodology, whereas Huff and Kline advocate a curricular model which is “a synthesis of vision, pedagogy, and theory” (xi).

As such a synthesis, The Contemporary Writing Curriculum does contribute to the body of work available on collaborative learning. It provides methodology and logistics for using journals, group work, and holistic peer evaluation, consistently grounding these practices in research and theory. Gere intentionally avoids discussing logistics, and Hillocks’ work does so only in such brief outlines of class activity as his treatment of the “scales” used in Sager’s and Clifford’s empirical studies. But Huff and Kline treat their selected subjects in depth. This approach is eminently more useful for the composition instructor. They organize the text logically as a triptych comprised of the “Rehearsing, Composing, and Valuing” elements mentioned in the title.

The “Rehearsing” component primarily deals with freewriting in the journal, discussing the journal’s value in cognitive development and its integration into composition classes. This section contains helpful models of student responses, formats for entries and checkoff sheets, as well as management techniques designed to preserve students’ privacy and teachers’ sanity. While journal writing is not usually a group activity, Huff and Kline adapt it to the collaborative setting; they use it to foster non-threatening reader response crucial to successful collaborative writing as well as to help students to generate material for longer compositions.

The “Composing” section consists of three chapters. One chapter covers predrafting techniques, offering interesting examples of intuitive, empirical, and rational heuristics. Another outlines the authors’ approach to drafting as a recursive process, but with what seems a linear progression from a “zero” draft to a “problem-solving” draft to a “final” draft. The third chapter, which deals with revision, opens with a discussion of composition’s social dimensions. Like Ken Macrorie, Peter Elbow, and Kenneth Bruffee, Huff and Kline advocate reading aloud. This practice helps promote audience awareness, enhance revision, and develop listening skills. However, Huff and Kline acknowledge that oral reading may need to be sacrificed in order to save class time. As a practical matter, they admit that the use of copies also has its advantages in peer response, particularly with longer pieces of writing, but they insist that oral reading should not be sacrificed in the early stages of group work.

In the third section, “Valuing,” Huff and Kline discuss the logistics of establishing writing groups. For example, Huff and Kline agree with Thom Hawkins and Peter Elbow in recommending five to seven members per group. They also agree with most authorities that without a clear definition of tasks, groups may do more harm than good to their writing. In addition to providing specific tasks, the instructor’s role is to give non-interfering guidance, monitoring, and validation. Guidance takes the form of redesigning classroom space, selecting group members, helping define group rules, and of course, designing and modeling training and instruction exercises. The discussion of structuring the physical environment for group work is interesting, but the information on group membership is sketchy. Concrete information on diagnostic criteria is sorely needed here, for a workable group membership is crucial to effective peer response work. Monitoring can take many forms but must carefully encourage independence and group responsibility, according to the authors. Finally, the authors argue that the teacher’s role is to help the class validate its activity upon completion of the task. Here, the authors again echo the collaborative theories of Bruffee, Elbow, Hawkins, and Gere in the value of “debriefing” at the end of every group exercise.

The chapter on group development is a unique contribution to the literature. The authors describe three stages from initial involvement to a transitional “discovery” stage (when the group realizes its potential power and responsibility) to a working stage in which tasks can be completed with little teacher intervention. At this point, the group achieves autonomy. While Hawkins and Elbow would agree that stable groups help writers work together more efficiently, Bruffee advocates changing group membership. Although such rotation does have advantages, Huff and Kline provide convincing evidence to justify stable group memberships. Group stability helps overcome defensive barriers built over years of competitive classroom situations. In order to respect and challenge one another’s ideas, students must first come to trust their peers; only then can they offer non-threatening formative evaluation.

The last chapter, on evaluation, introduces the process of holistic peer grading, a facet of Huff and Kline’s approach better suited to advanced writers than to college freshmen. Freshman composition instructors should be forewarned that insecure writers often feel threatened by peer grading. However, more mature students are likely to possess the confidence to critique such concerns as development, unfocused ideas, and mechanical errors. Advanced composition students would presumably have experience in recognizing and solving problems with content, style, and research methods in college-level writing, and so the demands of peer evaluation (both formative and summative) would not be overwhelming. Even so, requiring students to engage in summative evaluation poses difficulties. Although the authors cite Hillocks’ review of research to support peer evaluation, the focus of his comments is on formative input rather than final grading. Finally. Huff and Kline do not adequately resolve the two main drawbacks of holistic grading: the time needed for training, and students’ psychological resistance to the practice.

Unlike Thom Hawkins, who provides caveats as to when group work should not be attempted, Huff and Kline do not warn the composition teacher of potential pitfalls. Instructors will need to formulate their own pedagogical framework for these techniques because the authors do not discuss when to introduce each new phase of training in group work. The authors provide plans for a few days of drafting (92) or a few weeks of journal writing (47) but not an overall sequence for the semester. They do provide many instructional plans and models—some of which may unfortunately generate complex, time-consuming paperwork—as well as checksheets, response forms, peer-and self-evaluation forms, and scoring charts. Introducing this system must be gradual, or it will overwhelm both students and instructors.

Writing group advocates agree on the positive motivational and cognitive results of such collaborative programs; however, they also concur that we and our students have to gradually unlearn the competitive attitudes we bring to the composition classroom. Therein lie psychological and sociological difficulties that this work could have addressed more thoroughly. And the text could also have anticipated possible problems with interaction in heterogeneous groups. Despite these shortcomings, however, Huff and Kline’s book does achieve its purpose of synthesizing relevant research in a context of curricular planning that should prove useful for instructors and administrators.