Vicky

Ballmes
Writing 501
Fall 2015
Genre Piece

For my genre piece I chose to write a letter to my fellow Religious Studies graduate
students (TAs and future professors of religion, basically). I did this because the
discussion of pedagogy, of learning how to teach, has been quite a hot topic in my
department over the last couple of years, inspiring two colloquium meetings to discuss
how the department should teach its students how to teach. Both colloquia ended in a
draw, basically. I was the Lead TA several years ago and I was extremely frustrated at my
departments laissez-faire approach to Teaching Assistant instruction, let alone instruction
on how to be a good teacher of religion more generally. The faculty members refuse to
waste time on such concerns and put it on the grad students to teach each other how to
teach, which I found infuriating. I applied to teach in the Writing Program in part because I
wanted the chance to more seriously engage with teaching theory. I wanted to both
encourage fellow RS grads that there are people out there who take pedagogy seriously and
who are consciously trying to use cutting-edge research to shape classroom practice, like
the Writing Program does, and also give RS grads some practical advice for taking
advantage of that research in order to help their students become better writers. I know
that the question of how to approach writing instruction in a content-heavy class is a
frequent concern of others in my field and I remember facing the same problem myself. Its
easy to get caught up in editing a students paper and think that weve helped him become a
better writer by circling all of the comma infractions, without giving the actual content of
the paper as much thought.

Though my letter takes the form of a business letter, with the Writing Programs letterhead
at the top, the date, the address, a professionally-appropriate greeting of Dear (recipient),
and my personal contact information at the end, I deliberately made the tone of my letter
more informal, starting with the abbreviation grads in the greeting. I used parenthetical
asides throughout the letter to give it a more chummy, informal feeling that will hopefully
speak to the reader on a more personal and less clinical level. While I mentioned the type
of research that programs like the UCSB Writing Program are drawing on to shape their
methods and practice, I deliberately did not mention that research by name or even give
much specific information. The advice in this letter isnt intended to summarize the critical
research but instead give the graduate student reader a better idea of what exactly the
Writing Program does (if its not teaching grammar and spelling) and how those principles
can be extended into addressing writing in their own courses without taking too much time
away from the content of the course.


December 10, 2015

Graduate Students
Department of Religious Studies
Humanities and Social Sciences Building
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106

Dear Religious Studies grads,

Greetings from a fellow scholar of religion! Ive been a graduate student at UCSB for
8 years now and have been involved in teaching issues in our department in a number of
ways I was the Lead TA in 2011-2012 and organized and led the departments teaching
assistant training program (occasionally called the Training Future Faculty Program, but
only halfheartedly). Im also a founding member of the group PEERS (Pedagogical
Establishment for Educators in Religious Studies), which has been working on developing a
pedagogy-focused capstone course in Religious Studies, to the consternation of faculty
members who dont think that pedagogy is worthwhile, or even that it exists (you may
recall a certain faculty member deliberately attempting to thwart a recent department
colloquium discussion about developing some type of teacher training system by derailing
it into a debate over the term pedagogy and whether it has any meaning whatsoever. Its a
dangerous and effective technique, given that we cant even agree on a definition of what
religion is).
While Id like to believe that we will be able to depend on the department getting its
act together and stop resting on its laurels and claims that we have some of the best and
most sought-after TAs on campus (likely because were the most desperate for money and
have perfect the art of begging other departments to hire us, please, since our own
departmental funding is universally inadequate), the more practical side of me finds that
possibility unlikely. So with that in mind Id like to talk a little about pedagogy and how
writing instruction can fit into the way you structure your classes, both when youre a TA
and when you have the opportunity to teach your own classes (one thing that our
department is actually quite good at doing is giving us the opportunity to teach in the
summer, an upside to being cheap academic labor!).
Despite that particular professors claims that pedagogy isnt actually a thing and
that good teachers learn how to teach by watching good teachers teach, the world of
Writing Programs takes pedagogy seriously and is continuously trying to figure out the
best way to incorporate research on learning into practical application techniques. The
Writing Program at UCSB is known for its continuous development in search for the best
ways to teach people how to write effectively and well, and its current genre-studies
approach is seen as the cutting edge in first year composition circles. How does a focus on
textual genre help students learn how to write well? Teaching writing through the lens of
genre studies helps students learn how to understand a variety of texts, both academic and
non-academic not just grasp the content of the piece, but also understand its intended


audience and how it is effectively communicating with that audience. Students in a genre-
studies first year composition course learn that no writing exists in a vacuum. Texts always
have a context, and that context both shapes the text and shapes how the text is received.
The students learn how to read like a writer, to identify the rhetorical choices being made
by the author and how those choices are intended to influence the reader. This approach to
reading is very much in line with how we, as scholars of religion, teach our students how to
read primary and secondary sources to analyze the content and context and reconstruct
both what the author was trying to do and what the text has actually done. That is, the
teaching of writing through a genre studies approach accords well with how teachers in
departments like History and Religious Studies already work.
The key difference between how our field educates students in critical thinking and
how the Writing Program educates students lies in the name the Writing Program teaches
students how to read in order to learn how to write, not in order to learn how to write in a
specific context. Writing 2 courses are scaffolded in such a way that the students
knowledge builds upon itself first students learn how to identify the conventions of a
specific genre of texts and to analyze the way that different genres dealing with the same
subject can have very different purposes and results, then they learn how to identify the
specific genres, research techniques, and lines of inquiry that different disciplines use in
order communicate effectively within the discipline. This brings the theoretical discussion
into contact with their immediate, real-world context and gives the students concrete
techniques that they can use to discern how various groups, both academic and non-
academic, communicate and how to become one of the in-crowd. While they are writing
about these communication processes throughout the quarter, the course culminates in a
project in which the students have to both employ everything theyve learned about
writing in different genres in a performative writing piece of their own, in which they take
on the role of the author and transform an existing piece of writing for a new context and
audience, sometimes in a wildly different form. They perform this genre translation as an
act of culmination, bringing to bear everything theyve learned about genre conventions,
rhetorical purpose, and authorial intent.
What Id like to impart to you, fellow RS grad, is the idea that the UCSB Writing
Programs approach to first year composition can help you become a better teacher of
critical thinking and writing. I often hear TAs complain that they want to teach their
students how to write better but their hands are tied because so much of the time they
have with the students has to be focused on issues of content. How can you help students
improve their writing when you dont have the luxury of teaching a class whose sole
purpose is to teach students how to improve their writing? Believe me, I feel your pain.
Ive been there myself. Like most of the religion instructors I know, both professors and
TAs, Ive focused on the mechanics of writing in an attempt to help me students write
better. Ive graded many a paper with an editors hat on, focusing on the spelling and
grammar errors while paying less attention to the actual content of the students thoughts.
Like many of you I used to wonder what on earth they were learning in the required
writing courses, since they clearly werent learning what a sentence fragment is. Heres a
question for you, though I mentioned above that the Writing Programs approach is


considered to be on the forefront of research about teaching writing effectively, and I
described the general approach of a Writing 2 course created based on the genre studies
model of the Writing Program (my own Writing 2 course, as a matter of fact). Did you see
mechanical issues mentioned anywhere in that description? No. The goal of Writing 2 is to
help the students develop the skills to express themselves in multiple contexts. We focus
more on higher order concepts like the point being made, evidence, and analysis; while we
do address lower order issues like spelling and grammar, particularly in terms of habitual
errors and areas where bad grammar elides meaning, were far more concerned that the
students learn how to think and how to express those thoughts, not that they know not to
use an apostrophe for possession.
I urge you, as a teacher in Religious Studies, to also think about higher order
concepts when youre reading 60 essays on Martin Luther King, Jr.s interpretation of the
Bible. In addition to checking their understanding of how Dr. Kings nonviolent
noncooperation was based on the Gospel of Matthew, think about the broader picture of
how the student is expressing her ideas. Is her organizing principle clear? Does she
ground her discussion in specific evidence and make an attempt to accurately cite her
sources in MLA or Chicago style? Does she need to rethink the order of her points in order
to make an effective argument demonstrating the connection between Gandhis approach
to nonviolent resistance and Dr. Kings approach? Is her use of lexis (specific terminology)
appropriate for the context of the assignment? If you notice that the student often uses a
comma in place of a period or begins every other sentence with And feel free to make a
note about how you notice she often does XYZ, which is problematic because ABC, but dont
get so hung up on the little details that you overlook the forest for the trees. Proper
grammar is important, dont get me wrong (my editors heart would never permit me to
say otherwise, regardless of how much of the kool-aid Ive drunk), but unless its so bad
that you cannot figure out what the student is trying to say I think youll have more of an
effect on your students writing if you think big picture and not nitpick the details so much.
Help your students to see how they can communicate more effectively and be explicit in
telling them why its important that they do so despite what some may think, there is a
world out there beyond the academy, and our goal should be to help students learn how to
navigate not just academic writing but also all of the other types of writing that theyll do in
their lives.

Best,




Vicky Ballmes
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Religious Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara
vballmes@umail.ucsb.edu