Sigh, never good when Dr. Geller waits this long to write the class recap! Sorry — I’ll try to remember, and please add anything I’ve missed in the comments below.

We were a smaller group than usual, so we decided to finish talking about Brandt’s The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy as a large group. Alex and Cody took us back to the book’s Introduction, which we hadn’t made our way to (working backwards from Chapter 3) the previous week.

We spent most of our time with the Introduction asking why it might be important to pay attention to a chapter like this one that explains the details of a qualitative study. We talked about IRB (Institutional Review Board) approved research with human (or animal) participants and the ethical responsibility the researcher has to their research participants. Here are examples Dr. Geller said she would offer of two other sections that offer this type of explanation — the Rebecca Lorimer Leonard description Dr. Geller mentioned in class (and appendices), from her book Writing on the Move, and the chapter from Dr. Geller’s co-authored book that does this work. Also, here’s a slightly old (2008), but really good piece on the methods section of research reporting that includes some history of the practice in writing studies.

By the way, any of you could complete (if you haven’t) IRB/Human Subjects training at St. John’s to become certified and you could add that certification to your resume/CV. The information is all available on this St. John’s webpage.

We moved on to talk next about When Everybody Writes and the Conclusion. I can only compose these class recaps from my perspective, so again, feel free to add in comments or bring back to class or add in reflections anything you’d like to remember or note, but I think that for me the most interesting part of this conversation was coming to better understand the frustration with Deborah Brandt’s decision to say less (and seemingly ask her everyday writing participants less) about digital, online writing, and social media. Michelle talked about the figure of the Instagram influencer, and more specifically Instagram poets as influencers (see Rupi Kaur with 4.5 million followers and #instapoetry), as an example of how far the online, social media sphere has evolved. And Rachel followed up by asking whether a blog like the Julie/Julia Project would gain the same popularity now as it did in the early to mid-2000s and be turned into a book and a movie (there are a million descriptions, but this Eater article on Julie Powell’s death has an interesting quote from her comparing her blog and a journal and this is the famous article from the NYTimes). So for me, the important question we’re asking is: Are we in a different time/era of writing than the one Brandt is describing in her book? And the followup question I’d ask, and did ask in class, is: What would we want to know right now about writing and composing and authoring and how would we find out more about what we’d want to know.

Finally, we were left with not enough time in our last half hour to talk about Brandt’s Occupation: Author chapter about writers 15-25, but we did talk about Brandt’s thick chapter of these authors describing their writing and reading experiences, processes, mentors (“writing masters”), and lives. This was a study that grew out of a study (see pages 94-96 for an addendum and addition to description of method in the Introduction). I appreciated Will’s story of how this chapter led him to reflect on how he talks about the relationship of reading and writing and what inherited beliefs are within what he says. And I think it’s important to notice how much everyone appreciated the rich quotes and themes growing from the qualitative research of this chapter.

As always, we’ll take a few minutes at the start of next class for anyone to add anything I’ve missed that they’re left thinking! An interesting faculty position, related to all we’re thinking about, showed up this morning. Is it the related to a/the new future of writing studies?