After reading the next four essays of First-Year Composition, I was especially fascinated by Alexander Reid’s discussions on risk, reflection and student activity in the English Composition course. In The Activity of Writing: Affinity and Affect in Composition, Reid effectively ties these elements together and demonstrates how they can enhance student learning within a composition class.
Reid recognizes that in the real world, just about any form of communication, including writing, almost always involves some kind of risk. (192) In order to help prepare students for writing in settings outside the classroom, Reid encourages students to take risks through his grading system: “I want to create conditions where it is not necessary to play it safe…I tell them that they have little chance of getting an A without taking some risks, and that they have little chance of getting a C if they do take risks.” (193) I appreciate Reid’s approach to risk-taking, since I have learned from experience that taking a certain amount of risk is necessary to accomplish one’s goals in life. In the classroom, however, it can be difficult to encourage students to take risks if they are not comfortable doing so; if they know that they will be shamed for answering a question with the wrong answer, than they will be more likely to refrain from this type of risk-taking in future classes. Therefore, it is important to encourage students to take risks by not making them feel dumb when they do not have the right answer. Treating writing as a process that can lead to a valuable product allow students to take more risks because drafting a paper over time opens up experimentation in one’s writing.
One method that gets students to evaluate the risks they have taken with a piece of writing is by getting them to write a reflection after turning in their final draft. In this reflection, the writer should the strategies used when writing each draft, how these strategies changed from one draft to the next, and describe how the risks they took affected both the final draft of the paper and their perceptions on writing. I found Reid’s explanation of a network reflection very enlightening, especially his description of the reflection’s place in writing experimentation: “…writing becomes experimental in the artistic sense, but also in the scientific sense, and the reflection operates roughly analogous to a lab report.” (195) When teaching composition, I plan to stress that writing is a mode of experimentation. Writing does not come into being through a “magic formula” that works every time one sits down and starts typing; rather, the act of writing is a fluid process that evolves with the growth of the writer.
Seminar in Teaching Composition 
Diana,
In one sense, yes, of course I agree. We want students to experiment and take risks. In another sense, though, there’s something about this vocabulary that worries—in that it seems somehow more moral than critical. Good students take risks; bad students play it safe. And so on.
Your post here counters Jake’s r10 in some interesting and important ways. I’d be interested to hear what you make of his concerns, and my responses to them.
Thoughtful work, thanks,
Joe
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Diana,
I, too, was caught by Reid’s emphasis on risk-taking in the Composition classroom. I think that opportunity and space to take risks is so essential in the development of writing. Like you, as enthusiastic as I was with the concept of risk, I am also concerned about how it would practically play out in the classroom. I would want the risks to be meaningful. Therefore, I wish Reid had provided a more solid and defined understanding of the type of risks he is looking for. I think this would help with making the process of “taking risks” a more useful methodology, and it would also somewhat help to avoid the danger in which students might “take risks” simply as a gimmick for a good grade.
I was also dissatisfied with Reid’s solution of self-reflection as a tool for analyzing and evaluating the risks that students take. I think it would be difficult for anyone, but especially fairly new writers, to evaluate the effectiveness of their methods—this is especially so for those who are not as well-versed with academic conventions and the quality of work expected of them. What other ways are there to provide useful critique on risks? A few more related questions: what is considered a risk? How do we identify risks? How do we grade risks? Since students are at varied levels of writing, the definition of “risk” for one student may be drastically different than for another student; how do we account for these differences without being discriminatory?
Lavanya
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Diana,
I am intrigued by your discussion of risk, and as both Joe and Lavanya point out, it can be a difficult thing to assess. Lavanya, I am going to attempt to think through a couple of questions that you ask at the end of your post. As you point out, “since students are at varied levels of writing, the definition of “risk” for one student may be drastically different than for another student.” You further wonder how we might then assess risk. It seems to me that, in order to begin assessing what might be a risk for one student versus another, we need to establish some sort of understanding of where each student is coming from. Which leads me back to the literacy narrative. Maybe there is some way that we can alter this assignment so that we can gain some insight into our students’ writing practices early on in the semester? Also, I think assessment of risk simply requires time. Time to get a sense of what kind of work a student regularly produces, time to observe how students interact in the classroom, time to give students the chance to actually take some risks. The problem, of course, is that we only have a semester in which to do this.
Sarah
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Hi Diana,
I enjoyed reading your post and also was taken by Reid’s discussion of risk. The only thing I worry about is mistaking a term like risk for just “controversial, ” or something of that sort (I hope my class WordPress doesn’t turn into a conspiracy theory blog, at least). Reid doesn’t seem to go too in to depth about what exactly he means by risk, as others above have pointed out, but I initially had filtered it to consider form or style over content. Now that I think of it, though, teaching something like Berger that pushes against heteronormativity, I wonder if there might be some males (or females for that matter) that respond less than favorably to the reading. Still, I think this is an important part of what we’re teaching, and I would welcome some opposition if at least well thought out. And at any rate, some opposition might actually provide a chance to encourge someone to think through their “ways of seeing,” rather than having everyone in (perhaps forced) agreement right from the get-go. I feel like I am getting a bit tangled with this comment and hope we have a chance to tease some of these anxieties out in seminar.
Best,
John
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