Coming to See Myself as a Vernacular Intellectual

A short essay taken from remarks at the annual 2007 convention on getting the Exemplar Award. I look back over my career as an ongoing attempt to democratize writing--operating from the stance of a vernacular intellectual (a concept coined by Grant Farret)

A Unilateral Grading Contract to Improve Learning and Teaching [co-written with Jane Danielewicz]

Regular grading is a problem for many reasons--but most of all because it so often harms the climate for teaching and learning. In this essay we describe and explain a contract grading system that we have found extremely beneficial to teaching and learning. It\u27s a hybrid system. Students are guaranteed a B if they do all the things laid out in the contract. The teacher gives evaluative feedback as usual, but no teacher judgment can endanger the guaranteed grade. Grades higher than B, however, depend on teacher judgments of writing quality. The central leverage lies in designing a set of activities that--if engaged in over fourteen weeks--will get all students to improve enough to deserve a B

Vernacular Literacy

How our present culture of literacy serves to exclude many many potential writers--and why changing that culture is a sensible and feasible goa

A Unilateral Grading Contract to Improve Learning and Teaching

Contract grading has achieved some prominence in our field as a practice associated with critical pedagogy. In this context we describe a hybrid grading contract where students earn a course grade of B based not on our evaluation of their writing quality but solely on their completion of the specified activities. The contract lists activities we've found most reliable in producing B-quality writing over fourteen weeks. Higher grades are awarded to students who produce exemplary portfolios. Thus we freely give students lots of evaluative feedback on their writing, but students can count on a course grade of B if they do all the required activities--no matter our feedback. Our goal in using contracts is to enable teachers and students to give as much attention as possible to writing and as little as possible to grades. (Contains 17 notes.

The Nature of Knowledge in Composition and Literary Understanding: The Question of Specificity

↵PETER SMAGORINSKY is Assistant Professor, College of Education, University of Oklahoma, 820 Van Vleet Oval, Norman, OK 73019-0. He specializes in classroom literacy.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

The Music of Form

The concept itself of organization tends to be biased towards a picture of how objects are organized in space--and neglects the story of how events are organized in time. I’ll explore five ways to organize written language that harness or bind time. In effect, I\u27m exploring form as a source of energy

The Believing Game or Methodological Believing

The kind of thinking most widely honored is often called critical thinking. I call it the doubting game because the premise is that we should test ideas by subjecting them to the discipline of doubt. It\u27s a valuable and necessary methodology for good thinking because it trains us to find hidden flaws in ideas that sound attractive or that are widely assumed to be true. In this essay I suggest a different kind of thinking that is equally important but little honored or even noticed. I call it the believing game because the premise is that we should test ideas by subjecting them to the discipline of belief. The believing game trains us to find hidden virtues or strengths in ideas that sound wrong or even crazy, or that are widely assumed to be false