Donna Qualley Past Interviews

VOICES ON: Writing Instruction as a Social Process Donna Qualley directs the composition program at Western Washington University. She has published a number of articles as well as the book Turns of Thought: Teaching Composition as Reflexive Inquiry (Heinemann 1997). Qualley received her Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire. Could you describe the writing courses that are required of all your students? The required introductory writing course at Western Washington University, 101 Writing and Critical Inquiry, meets in a networked computer classroom once a week and a traditional classroom for the other two-hour class. Instructors all use a portfolio system and individual writing conferences. The course aims to help students — through extended practice in reading, writing, and discussion — develop and practice those critical and reflective habits of mind that will serve them personally, professionally, and academically. Students gain practice in: DEVELOPING a thoughtful and informed perspective on the subject at hand. EXAMINING the reasons for their thinking, and showing or explaining how or why they came to hold such a perspective. SITUATING their perspectives in the context of other perspectives on the same or similar subjects. COMMUNICATING their perspective clearly and effectively through written texts to their designated audiences. Can you explain how the view of writing instruction as a social process has shaped your program? The first-year program is based on the philosophy that teaching and learning are social, dialogic processes. Both teachers and students need time to talk with others about their work. Composition instructors formally meet each week to share ideas, discuss issues pertinent to teaching, and read student work. In addition, at the end of every quarter, instructors engage in day-long assessment and conversations about their students' portfolios. Informally, instructors collaborate on teaching projects. Such sharing contributes to the strength of our program. We extend this philosophy into the classroom. Instructors meet with students for individual writing conferences outside of class at least three times during the quarter, students work in writing and reading response groups, and participate in weekly small group discussions via e-mail or the common book. Please tell us about the common book. One of my favorite teaching tools is the common book for students. I divide the class into four small groups and place four notebooks in the library each week. Students must write at least two pages in response to a prompt or in response to another student. Threads develop over time between students, and they learn what it means to be involved in an academic conversation. When I respond to the students who have written in the common book, I respond to them individually. When I use email discussion groups, I respond to the group as a whole. In a recent common book correspondence, my students and I talked about faultlines, those perspectives determined by an individual's class, race, age, geography, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and so on. I asked students to consider which of their own faultlines were activated in response to an assigned reading. Different situations activate different perspectives. Sometimes we respond on the basis of gender; sometimes age or geography. Students thus practiced two of the course goals: examining their own perspective and situating that perspective in the context of other members of their common book group. Where do you see the composition field headed? In the 1960s and 1970s we were influenced by linguistic theories of sentence combining: these theories focused our attention on the text. Then process theories focused our attention on the writer. Now we've expanded our focus to consider the social, cultural, and political contexts. I don't think it's a matter of replacing one theory with another, but of adding to our knowledge. My own work has centered on the importance of reflexivity for learning. I am interested in how ethnographic methods and perspectives can inform the teaching of writing and help students learn to develop the essayistic stance, an open, dialogic and reflexive perspective. I recall this wonderful Annie Dillard essay, "Singing with the Fundamentalists," which she wrote when she was teaching at Western Washington University in the 1970s. She looks out the window at a group of Christian students singing by the fountain in the square. Instead of criticizing what she does not understand from her distant and protected position in her office, Dillard goes down and joins them. She can't understand what has brought them here, but she knows that she may begin to understand if she is open to their perspective, if she moves in close. I think of that movement from the office to the fountain as critical to our ethical development as a field.

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