Last year we all began to investigate the relationship between theory and practice in the classroom, leading us towards the notion of ourselves as "teacher-researchers." The Student Profile Project is a logical extension of those investigations. It asks our students to theorize about the writing process; in turn, it asks us to reflect, with them, on composition and composing. As we move into our new program, the SPP will help us to know the skills and needs of the students we are trying to serve while at the same time involving both teacher and student in the research process. In this way, abstract notions about what we do can be tested in the field and new hypotheses generated through our interactions with our students.

Even more importantly for the actual work of day to day teaching, the profile can help to break down barriers in the classroom by allowing students to interact almost immediately as they interview each other and compile the class magazine. The literacy autobiography and composing process inventory will involve the students very early in the semester in the kind of reflective and analytical modes of thought and writing that we hope they will continue to develop over the course of time. In fact, this relatively short exercise (estimated 4-5 one hour class periods) can be said to launch many of our central intellectual and classroom activities

Most of all, though, the format of the project will break down the traditional barrier between researcher and subject by compelling us to be constantly aware that while at one level we are collecting data, performing research, that we are simultaneously involved in instruction and that our sources of data are not objects we can analyze, but, rather, conscious, informed human beings who are participants in the project, not passive subjects for investigation.

Since the Student Profile Project is so important this year, the Summer Team asked members of the staff teaching over the summer to do a "dry run" of the project so that we could, so to speak, "test our theories in the field." What we really wanted were some willing "victims" who would help us find the "bugs" (get it? Field work?) in the system before the project was attempted on a grand scale. Both Anne Fitzsimmons and Laurence Zoeckler, who taught in the Summer Institute, agreed to do trial runs of the profile and to write about their experiences for Reflections. As you will see, the profile has built-in flexibility and is open to a variety of strategies and styles. The profile, like the program, is new and in the process of formation. Keep in mind, then, that Anne's and Larry's methods should not be viewed as definitive: rather, they represent two different angles of approach to the same problem. We hope that the experiences of these two instructors will serve as springboards as you begin to think about how the SPP should be further refined and developed in the fall workshops and how you will use it in your own classes.

Laurence Zoeckler:

When I was asked to give Margaret Himley's Student Profile Project a first run in my Summer Institute class, I agreed for two reasons: first, it would provide an opportunity for me to get to know my students better (and for them to get to know each other); secondly, it would provide a useful writing activity for my class. Since the Summer Institute is slightly different from the "regular" Summer Sessions at SU, it is likely that the student profile developed for my class is quite different from a composite profile that might be developed for the entire freshman class in the fall. Still, the exercise is valuable for individual classes because it can provide insight for teachers who have very little time to get to know their students.

I introduced the project to my class in much the same way in which it had been introduced to me: as a writing project aimed at determining a general student profile based on information provided by the students themselves, rather than on more general indicators like SAT scores or class standings. We looked at the four hypothetical "Georges," and I asked my students if they felt they matched with any of these four. Georges 1, 3, and 4 were summarily dismissed as altogether unrecognizable, but roughly half the class identified, at least to some extent, with George #2. (Only one, however, had read any Jack Kerouac, and had reacted to him with considerably less enthusiasm than had the hypothetical George.) [Authors' note: In fact, there is really only one George, about whom there are four different hypotheses. The SPP is currently being revised to make this fact clearer since there has been remarkable consistency in the "original interpretations" of the description. The revisions will be handed out at the staff meeting.]

While the three tasks presented in the project overlap considerably in content, they are different enough as writing exercises that they are all worth giving a try. The overlapping itself can serve a purpose, too, since it gives the students a chance to think about the issues involved, and their responses to those issues, at three different times. While the second and third responses are much like the first, they are often more detailed or more clearly articulated.

My class found the interview the most enjoyable of the three tasks, and the "Literacy Autobiography" the most taxing. I used the composing process inventory provided in Margaret's write-up, but the class drew up their own list of questions for the interviews. Since they knew the purpose of the interviews, the list of questions dealt primarily with family background, academic and outside interests, and the students' understanding of their own reading and writing skills and interests. As a general rule, the finished products sounded like high-school yearbook profiles, but they were surprisingly well-written. The style of the interview often revealed more about who was doing the interview than it did about the person being interviewed, so it may be important to keep track of who writes what about whom.

The literacy autobiographies presented much of the same information as the interviews, but without the overlay of a third party (the interviewer). Most of my students began reading early, and all of them like to read. Only a handful write because they enjoy writing: nearly the entire group writes only "when they have to."

The composing process inventory revealed that while none of the students had conscious rituals for writing, all of them depended on a rather rigid ritual for motivation--writing is a school-oriented activity, which takes place in the overall context of a classroom situation, more often then not a testing situation. As a result, writing is a kind of "conditioned response ritual"--the students write because they're told to write. For my students, writing is not an end in itself--it is a vehicle for something else (usually the concrete transferal of concrete information), and usually that something else has to be provided from outside before writing can begin.

Anne Fitzsimmons:

Over a four day period in the second week of my six week summer term, I ran two of the three suggested writing tasks in the Student Profile Project. I only ran two because the questions my students drafted for their "class interview" just happened to be similar to the questions suggested for the "literacy autobiography" [Anne's class questions appear at the end of this article]; and rather than have the students compose two separate papers--given the very short amount of time we have together--I asked them to write one brief synopsis of the interview they conducted. The "composing process inventory" I ran just as it was printed in Margaret's article.

I am going to try to answer, based on my class responses, some of the questions the Student Profile Project claims to address. But, before I begin, I would like to make a few comments about my Summer Institute class. The students I taught in my 101 class last Spring greatly lowered my expectations of what SU undergraduates are capable of. They were a melange of athletes, transfers, repeaters, and lazy (or worse) upperclassmen. To a person they were unmotivated, undisciplined, poorly read, and contemptuous of the course (although the contempt of many was merely an attempt to mask their fear about writing). I wasn't ever very excited about their work. My Summer Institute students, on the other hand, are highly motivated, enthusiastic, conscientious, and fairly confident about themselves as students (some even came in slightly arrogant, but we've been working on that over the last four weeks). I am often excited by their work and the progress certain individuals seem to be making. But now I am left confused; I don't know which group is more representative of the kind of students taking Freshman English at SU. I have a profile (of sorts) of my present students, yet I'm not sure if it will be of any use. Many of my students are on campus now because of an HEOP Grant requirement, or because they've been given other funding to get a jump on their college careers. Consequently, they are under a great deal of pressure to do well--the kind of pressure my Spring semester students never experienced. What I'm trying to suggest is that even if these Summer Institute students fit the mode of "George" in various ways, their performance in class is far different from what the models might actually lead us to expect.

Now, about the questions: the Project asks us to evaluate if "George" is indeed typical of entering freshman at SU--or in what ways he might be redesigned. My "George" has had many successes in high school: academic, athletic, and extracurricular. His SAT scores may not be indicative of a "top ten" student (perhaps just another indication of the way in which college testing is skewed toward white, middle-class students--8 of my 10 students are minorities), but he received good grades in high school, in addition to participating in a wide range of other activities. He has been exposed to a number of different writing projects, including research papers, critical essays, book reports, personal narratives, and editorials. His attitude toward writing is generally good, once he gets past the initial reluctance to really apply himself to a task. He does his best and most enthusiastic writing on topics that are of personal interest, and finds an assignment especially difficult when it has no relevance in his life. He feels a great deal of pressure to do well, and to continue with the success he became accustomed to in high school.

Out of the four hypotheses in the Student Profile Project, mine most resembles #2. But I think my "George" differs from the original hypothesis in the sense that he is a highly motivated student who, despite his initial reluctance to work at his writing, reads instructor comments with care, avidly drafts and revises, and takes a great deal of pride in a finished project that has earned him a "good" or "passing" grade. "George's" writing skills are limited, yet through the course of the semester (or rather the summer session) his writing grows gradually more sophisticated. His textual organization improves drastically as he works on revision after revision. He strengthens the logic of his arguments by ensuring that his paragraphs are cohesive and appropriately ordered. He learns the difference between a compound and a complex sentence, and how to develop them both effectively while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of the fragment and the fused sentence. "George's" attitude toward writing changes as well; he no longer views an essay assignment with dread, but rather as a chance to show the instructor how much he has learned from the last assignment. He begins to identify his own weakest areas, and what types of assignments prove most difficult. In effect, he learns to analyze himself as a writer, and to view his work as other than just something to be read by an instructor.

My Summer Institute students generally enjoyed participating in the Student Profile Project. It gave them a chance to learn a little bit about their new classmates, and it also gave them a chance to break away from the Baker essay format for a couple of days (a welcome relief). I found that the texts they generated from the class interviews were quite good: creative, imaginative, lively, and not the least bit disorganized or unstructured. The General Essays class they found on the whole tedious, but they appear unanimously to have come through with a great feeling of pride in their best papers, and a new-found respect for the process of revision.

In addition to what appears above, Larry and Anne had these thoughts about what they might do differently with the project in the fall.

Larry said that he expects to do the interview and autobiography in reverse order since this will give the students a better chance to think over the questions they will be asked in the interview. He would also require a first draft of the Literacy Autobiography so that he will be able to direct students to give more complete responses in any areas they seemed to "skim over"

Anne felt that she needed to guide her students more in the development of the interview questions so that there would be less redundancy when they completed their Composing Process Inventories. At the same time, she was dissatisfied with their responses on the inventory and is considering reforming it as an essay rather than using the series of short answer questions that appear in the working papers.

What we asked Larry and Anne to do is simply work these tasks into their courses and see what kind of results occurred. What they didn't have an opportunity to do, and what we will have an opportunity to do in the fall, is to share the texts students produce, discuss and debate patterns and interpretations of those texts, and expand or reject or even modify alternative portrayals of who our students are and what happens to them as writers in our classes. The primary source of this activity will be the coordinating groups.

"George Who?" or "Where Was I the Day Someone Impersonated Me and Put My Name on a Writing Program Article?"

Oh God. It was so long ago. Aeons ago. In all truthfulness I don't remember the Summer Institute course in which I implemented the George heuristics. I also don't remember which students were in the course, and I don't remember writing about the Student Profile Project. But I have the text in front of me, and I have faint memories of discussions about George. They may be enough.

I'm remembering the Student Profile Project as an attempt to discover who our students are: their personal backgrounds, their past writing experiences, etc., and to compare their portraits with a description of a generic student code-named "George." And I can't help but contrast that type of student profile with the inquiry in my most recent 105 (co-designed with Steve Feikes). The title of the course is "Behind the Mask of Writing," and for the first half of the semester students write all different kinds of fragmentary texts, ranging from literacy moments to reading responses to "voice" analyses. Their polished text is a mid-term portfolio, in which they make and support a series of claims about their writing and about themselves as writers. They "profile" themselves, but only after they have had an opportunity to actually practice writing. And they make their claims by noting the patterns, trends, characteristics, and anomolies that arise within the range of their own writing. Who are you? we once asked our students, and tried to stimulate thoughtful responses. You are writers, I now say to my students, but then invite them to assert just what kinds of writers they are.

I know, as we all do, that students bring into the writing studio attitudes about and experiences with writing that, as similar as they appear on the macro level, are full of fascinating and revealing differences on the micro level. And my sense is that the "George" model was an attempt not only to identify those typical student attitudes and personalities, but to challenge and upset them as well. As Margaret Himley writes in her "Preface" to "'George' and Beyond," "The idea was to start with a notion of 'typicality,' in order to get at difference and contrast." Reflection and self assessment, two "typical" studio practices, help my students move beyond their initial profiles of themselves as writers (profiles that tend to be extremely narrow and one dimensional), and discover the varied, complex and sometimes contradictory characteristics that more accurately and richly define them as writers and thinkers in the academy and in their personal lives. The Student Profile Project was an attempt to "read" our students so that we could more successfully attend to their writing needs. But writing studio practices, when introduced to students in meaningful ways, allow them to read themselves, to construct their own identities as writers, and to participate more self consciously in the process of learning. "George" does exist, but in a more fragmented form than we imagined in the beginning, and when students become aware of the fragments (as well as write the fragments), they wrest their agency back from the academy. They become not generic figures, but critical beings.--Anne Fitzsimmons, 1997

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A Guy Called George

Of all the Writing Program projects and initiatives we might examine to help us understand our history, few are likely to reveal more than the Student Profile Project, known best by the name of its key character, "George." The George project was one of several early attempts to address our new director Louise Wetherbee Phelps's assertion that before we could design an innovative writing curriculum, we would have to understand both our students and their institutional context. Only then could we hope to interpret and apply the theoretical constructs Louise was providing; only then could we design theory- and research-based courses appropriate for our students in our particular setting. As was often the case in those days, a theoretical impulse for action was provided by Louise, and a practical path along which that action might travel was charted by Margaret Himley. On the surface, the George project was Margaret's answer to the question: Who are our students? On a second level, it was a response to the challenge of process. George was not only a "Who?" (or "What?"); he was also, to my mind critically, a "How?" In its fundamental call for inquiry and its impulse toward action, the George project was both a research enterprise whose findings we valued even before we knew them and an exercise in process that would allow us, the Writing Program's teachers, to experiment with using writing to learn, to think, and to discover as well as to communicate.

From the vantage of 1997, we can wonder if anyone actually took the Georgian Hypotheses seriously. Did we ever really imagine that our students might have read Jack Kerouac in high school? Wasn't there something wistfully romantic about picturing them as "intellectually lively" but "inexperienced," untutored minds willing and eager to be cultivated? How did we allow the male George to exist even momentarily without Leslie, his supposed female analog? (Furthermore, look at those names!) The answers aren't to be found in our ignorance or naivete. There was method of at least three sorts in the seeming madness of George. First, George set the tone: the new Writing Program valued teacher research, so much so that hours of class time would be devoted to researching George. Second, the posing of hypotheses and the description of activities to test them established a research style, initially for teachers and later for students. We wouldn't investigate George by sending over to Admissions for demographic data or by dishing up machine-scored questionnaires on the first day of class. George's profile would not be sketched by filling in circles with a number two pencil. Instead, George was to be discovered over time, extensively and recursively, through conversation and through writing--reflective writing.
It's worth digressing to note that George, Syracuse's Everystudent, was born at Wild Acres, a retreat center on a mountain near the Pisgah Forest in North Carolina. And although his creators, myself among them, claim to have shaped his nature in light of our experience with real live Syracuse students during the 1986-87 academic year, he looked on the one hand suspiciously more like WP teachers' biological offspring than our students ever would, and on the other hand more like what we would wish for in our students (bright but inexperienced, lively but unfocused) than our actual students ever have looked. We might say we were a tad out of touch, but herein lies the project's third strength. The Georgian Hypotheses were--perhaps unconsciously, but I prefer to think subtly--cautionary. "This," they seem to whisper, "is who we are." Or, "This is what we dream about teaching writing . . . when classes are over, when grades are turned in, when a crackling fire takes the chill off a cool Carolina evening, and we are far from home." Did we know that when the sun rose and the mist cleared and the summer waned and the new semester began, we would set to work dismantling George as we had constructed him? I believe we did.
To begin testing the hypotheses, the project posed three writing tasks. Student interviews (to be written up and published as class magazines), literacy autobiographies, and composing process inventories were all to occur during the first two weeks of WRT 105 classes. Student responses would be discussed in coordinating groups. "We hope," Margaret wrote in Working Papers: A Report from the Studio 1 Curriculum Group "that doing these tasks will not only give us a richer picture of who our students are, but also get classes off to a good start." Anyone who has used student interviews and class magazines, anyone who has invited students to compose a bit of narrative about their own writing and reading, can testify to the efficacy of these projects. They broke the ice and built classroom community, and by providing a "way in" for students of every ability and inclination, they explicitly acknowledged and implicitly valued what students brought. They valued teachers, too, allowing choice and variety (interview in pairs or small groups? design a cover and write a preface for the magazine? write one continuous narrative? break it up into "snapshots" and compile an "album"?) while providing for communal dabbling with studio practices and assuring several program-wide products. In asking students to investigate themselves and their writing using talk and writing, the three tasks pulled together and layered content and form, process and product. They taught challenging skills--analysis, reflection, interpretation--using familiar materials in friendly territory. Not surprisingly, students found the George project highly engaging.
In fact, students found the profiling activities so attractive and so generative that those of us envisioning a longitudinal study of student writing, the Odyssey Project, celebrated the growing conviction that students really could be full co-researchers with teachers. As Odyssey took shape in 1990, four (and soon afterward twelve) teachers extended the profile project to create a widening circle of inquiry. "Who are our students?" became "Who are we?" which led to "Who and what else is on our campus?" and "What does it mean . . . for our history and for our future?" So although George and Leslie may not be the parents of Baby O., the Odyssey Project clearly bears a family resemblance to the program's early experiments with profiling.
Far less clear is what has happened to the notion of profiling as a program project. Coordinating group and hallway talk indicate that many teachers, even those who are not teaching Odyssey versions of WRT 105, assign writing activities such as literacy letters (write a letter introducing yourself to your instructor or to the class), interviews of class colleagues, or narratives of early experience that inquire into and reflect upon who our students are. Anne Fitzsimmons writes about how she uses profiling activities in her essay "George Who?". Occasionally, however, I hear "Been there, done that" to the suggestion that we ask students to inquire into their own literate and intellectual selves.
If we are referring to ourselves as a program, "Been there, done that" fits. We have, indeed, profiled our students, and we have gathered experience and developed expertise in doing so. I worry, though, that some of us are saying "Been there, done that" with a bored or jaded sigh. I think the sigh may be a passive code for our sense of the Writing Program's genuine expertise coupled with frustration that our expertise goes largely unrecognized. Maybe we remember a time when the University seemed not to care about who, exactly, the students who are the audience for our teaching are. If I've touched a nerve here, I urge a second look at our institutional context. My work in campus outreach provides me opportunities and vantage points outside the Writing Program, and I see change. In the past year alone, the Vice President for Undergraduate Studies, the Syracuse Academic Improvement Program, and the Athletes' Center for Education Support have all recognized our expertise in profiling, have sought consultation and collaboration, and have offered support in return.
If, on the other hand, the bored look and sigh are authentic in that they signify a belief that we asked the questions and we have the answers, I urge another kind of second look, a deeper and more thorough investigation, of our students and also of ourselves. It is true that with the help of George, we profiled our first-year students in 1987-88. Those students were born, most of them, in 1969. They didn't watch MTV, and they came without computers. They were mostly European American. They were raised at home, in a family with two adults, one of whom, usually the male, was the primary wage earner. It isn't difficult to imagine that 1997's first-year students will be different, and this alone argues that it is time for another full, deep, program-wide inquiry into, well . . . "Sandy." Short for Alessandra/Alessandro. Gender-neutral. Gritty. Suggests shifting, and change. Change is the essence. The George project was certainly intended to yield a product, but it was never designed to be finished, any more than the studio curriculum was intended to be "finished." If we pride ourselves on building from theory and adjusting according to context in order to squeeze between the rock and a hard place of prescription and reaction, we have to commit to ongoing research of student audience. To do our best work, we need to know who ourstudents are.
More important, to do their best work, they need to know who they are. Further, they need to know how to discover who they are, so they can do it again and again, on their own, long after their college writing teachers have faded from memory. They need to believe that such self-discovery through observation and reflection--through writing--is important to keep doing. When we accord profiling a central place in a first year writing course, we signal to students the value of intellectual engagement with personal literacy development. When we teach and practice the skills that make such intellectual engagement possible, we are, in essence, giving our students the incomparable gift of their literate and intellectual selves.--Nance Hahn, 1997