Past...

God...What seems like ages ago, I wrote this. It was purged for awhile, but it's in my head again, every day as I walk to teach or walk to class. The thesis that it came from was...well, it's done. This is where I think things are headed, if you're keeping track.


"What this study has done for me—in retrospect—is to highlight a part of a network, where our students find themselves at the nexus. I have said at multiple times throughout this process, that I was interested in their navigation, the navigation of the network that is their college experience. While compositionists and rhetoricians are turning towards networks as a way to educate students, to understand behaviors, to produce writing, and to generally better understand the environment that we, in our many roles (writers, teachers, scholars, humans) live in (Edbauer, 2005, Phelps, 1998, Shaviro, 2003), educational studies are highlighting networks as critical to student success (Bain, 2004, Light, 2001, McKeachie & Svinicki, 2006, Kuh et al, 2005). Again, in retrospect, Pintrich’s claim that context, including social and cultural forces, should be considered when looking at student motivation mirrors what composition theory is moving toward. At the beginning of this study, I only saw my desk in the Writing Lab, and later my classrooms, where this fluctuating population of students came and went, and I wondered how successfully they were able to make their transitions through later courses. These preliminary ideas led to a research project that seems to have led to more questions. At this point, I see the time that it took to complete this study, as well as the stumbles, trips, and falls that occurred along the way as stepping stones, rather than wasted time. While this was never meant to be a longitudinal study, I believe that research like this, in order to be truly successful, needs to be longitudinal. It also still needs to be focused on the students’ navigation—perhaps over their college careers, from their initial day in First-year composition, through their Writing Lab usage, through their WI courses, and finally, as they enter the job markets in their chosen degrees."

It felt really strange to just put quotation marks around something I wrote...