There were several questions which needed answering from the beginning, each one of them growing, again, out of an increasing awareness that the assumptions and biases about writing that I carried with me to Syracuse stood, in many instances, in opposition to a vital teaching practice within the studio curriculum. This realization manifested itself perhaps most clearly in some of the dilemmas I found myself facing while grading and responding to my first set of student papers. As I read the papers (these were draft versions of a paper on literacy learning, using Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary as a source), it occurred to me that I had little support, pedagogically speaking, for the response strategy I was considering; I realized that I could mark student writing on the basis of mechanical error, but beyond that, it seemed, I would be relying on a notion of good writing which lived, without explicit genealogy, in a shadowy region where exist unspoken, unelucidated (and therefore largely untransmittable) assumptions about what good writing is. I recognized with distinct unease that, although I had a certain vague notion that I could, in an almost intuitive fashion, judge "good" writing from "bad," I really hadn't any reasoned defense for my judgment values that went beyond vague notions like "flow," "organization," "clarity," and the like. I had difficulty seeing how a comment about, for instance, a lack of "clarity" in a student's paper could actually be translated into action by that student: how could the use of such indefinite terms facilitate students' efforts at improving their own writing?

The content of Rose's Lives on the Boundary underscored the importance of the dilemma I faced in responding to student papers: as I reflected upon his reported experiences with writing assessment and English teaching, it became increasingly plain that the vaguely "formalist" evaluation / grading strategy I had thought to rely upon would, at best, simply reinforce the strictly striated categories (good writers / bad writers, and thus, successful and unsuccessful students) implied by traditional systems of writing evaluation / grading in the first place. At worst (and this seemed likely), the useless terminology I was about to use, coupled with an emphasis on mechanical errors, would amount only to responses which might actually seriously disable the efforts of less accomplished students like the young Mike Rose‹confirm their fears that they couldn't "cut it," assign them to the bottom of the academic abyss, and provide them with no map, no tools with which to begin extricating themselves. I could indicate to students how their work might be received in other university classes, comment obscurely about their writing's "coherence" and the like, and make note of mechanical errors, but I did not know how I could effectively teach them to improve their writing at all‹a disturbing awakening. It occurred to me that, if my writing studio was going to be useful at all to my students, I would need to develop, and quickly, a concept of writing that relied less upon inexplicit, unspoken assumptions about writing, and more upon recognizable, articulable categories and concepts. In short, I needed a working theory.

Two of the readings for the 613 course, Patricia Stock's "The Dialogic Curriculum" and the opening chapter of Bartholomae and Petrosky's Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts, articulated more specifically what I took to be the real import of Rose's book: the debilitating effects of a composition pedagogy which responds to student writing only in terms of its conformity to or deviance from a fixed and usually "silent" standard for academic writing. As I considered Bartholomae and Petrosky's book, and also the kind of development evidenced by [a case study of undergraduate student] Wendy's work in "The Dialogic Curriculum," I began to understand how deeply my own intended style of response to my students' papers was informed by the subtle influence of the "test-taking" or "knowledge-telling" notions of writing against which both of the two essays argue. I had intended, and had even explicitly told my class, that my 105 course was to be conceived as a course in writing, and not a course in reading comprehension or knowledge accumulation: their papers, I said, were not assigned simply as a testing device, in which they could demonstrate to me that they had read, studied, and "understood" Rose's book. Yet, in my initial evaluations of their papers, I saw how my original terms‹"clarity" and "organization"‹revealed my perception of how their readings of Lives on the Boundary diverged, both stylistically and conceptually, from what I recognized as an academically "authorized" reading of that book; I was not only asking my students for a reading of Rose's book, but rather to produce, without assistance, a rather narrowly-defined "correct" reading of it‹to demonstrate their knowledge of what such a reading might look like. Despite the claims I had made to my class, I was upset to discover, the evaluations of their drafts that I had thus far formulated were indeed almost entirely based on a "test-taking" model. Student readings of Rose's book figured simply as inadequate demonstrations of their knowledge of the "authorizd" one; misreadings figured as failure.

In contrast to this, perhaps the most striking feature of the approach to writing advocated in "The Dialogic Curriculum" was the way in which responses to Wendy's writing put such high value upon her essays as real communication to her readers communication which was valued, not for its ability to simply convey knowledge or information, but for its ability to "integrate...existential and textual realms" (5). It seemed that the response strategy implied in "The Dialogic Curriculum" went back and redefined the very roots of composition teaching for me: it went, first of all, beyond the evaluative question "how might I determine what is and is not "good writing?" to an even more fundamental one‹"what is writing in the first place?" And I liked the answer that I read out of the article: writing is, first and foremost, a human activity that always takes place within a dialogic structure‹it is a reciprocally communicative, social act. It seemed to me that such a notion of language use opened up a way for me to read and respond to student writing more humanely‹to read with respect for the validity of students' various appropriations of course material for their own purposes. A response strategy which emphasized, first of all, the value of writing as socially situated knowledge-making offered an attractive alternative to the ultimately useless or even harmful emphasis on writing as mere knowledge-telling according to the formal prescriptions of academic style.

I began rereading student papers, then, with the intention of discovering what it was that students were trying to communicate‹how they were making sense of course material in terms of their own lived experience. Taking cues from the introductory chapter of Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts, I followed a simple format in conferences and in written responses to the first unit papers which, I hoped, would emphasize the validity of student writing-acts by treating those acts (which in many cases were in fact "misreadings" of Rose's book, according to the standards of academic discourse) not as failures but as real attempts at negotiating "their understanding of what they have read and their understanding of what they must say to us about what they have read" (4). As Bartholomae and Petrosky's discussion of one student's difficulty with writing has it,

She faces the essential dilemma of any reader: to write about the text she must displace it, cast it into her own terms, turn it into something that it is not...She has to misread, and she has to take that misreading as a sign of her place as a reader and not as a sign of her failure" (6).

Recasting the notion of writing as "misreading" within a conventional system rather than failure to demonstrate knowledge or proficiency seems useful to me: it provides immediate goals for my responses to student writing (get writers to recognize how they are construing their readings, get them to look at such constructions in relation to ones which empower writers in academic contexts), while leaving intact my ability to validate their readings as legitimate communication. In this evolving evaluation scheme, I can retain "academic writing" as the goal for my students, but their written work and my responses together now figure as, among other things, a dialogic negotiation between their understandings and my representation of "academic" ones.

In writing responses to papers, then, I have adopted a two-part policy. First, I summarize‹sketch out my own understanding of what each student is trying to communicate in her/his paper: I try to give students some sense of what argument they seem to be making in their papers, so that they can compare their intentions with my reception of their written work. My hope is that careful summary might convey to each student that her/his work is really being read attentively, with a view toward discovering what it is that s/he has to say about, for instance, Lives on the Boundary (how s/he seems to be making sense out of the textual world of Rose's book‹how s/he accommodates that text to his/her lived experience and offers that accommodation as a way for others to understand). Second, I offer my own "take" on the specific aspects of the issue of literacy that students discuss in their papers [literacy was the topic of inquiry in the 1990 "invitational syllabus."] This is done with the intention of effecting a real dialogue on the topic at hand between student writers and myself, between their discourse and the one which they must adopt in the academic world, between "their understanding of what they have read and their understanding of what they must say to us about what they have read."

After I responded to my unit-one papers, however, it became apparent that the power relationship that inheres in the student/teacher relationship is too strong for students to feel comfortable with anything but capitulation after I offer my own views. Despite my intentions, students received my own reading of the topic at hand as an indication that they had "failed" that their own "translations" of Rose's text were worthless, having deviated from my own "authorized" one; in many of the correspondences that I collected after responding to the drafts, students had utterly abandoned their own voices on literacy learning, some even going so far as to apologize for "missing the point." After seeing how little value students placed on the validity of their own appropriations of course material, I decided that, in the future, I would counter students' "translations" of course material, not with my own, but with the translations put forth by other students.

Although I was (tentatively) happy with the response strategy I had developed, it seemed that I could not credibly espouse this method of response to students' writing without significantly altering the structure of my entire course. Still following on the dialogic principle implied in "The Dialogic Curriculum," I altered my course plans to accommodate student concerns. The issues I am exploring with my class in units two and three of my 105 course were conceived as more or less a direct response to questions I saw implicit or explicit in the written work that students submitted early on in the semester in response to Rose and other readings. These questions were largely concerned with the relevance of the unit to their own lives. But in spite of my changes in the course, I still wanted to make sure that students could develop some coherence between the three units of the course; I felt that the intertextual-style reading of Wendy's sequence of written work discussed in "The Dialogic Curriculum" stressed an important aspect of writing-teaching based on a notion of the dialogic nature of writing-acts: if I were to respond to student writing in the mode of a continuing conversation between writer and reader, it would, it seemed to me, be counterproductive and perhaps inappropriate to stunt the growth of such conversation by introducing sharp topical breaks in the focus of the course. The topical continuity of the course outline I eventually settled on has made it possible for me to respond to student submissions for units two and three in the mode of a continuing conversation that began at the beginning of the semester.

As I consider how to, in the future, best employ the response strategy that has emerged out of my reading of "The Dialogic Curriculum" and Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts, it occurs to me that there are still several difficulties that stand in need of resolution. One of these difficulties has to do with what I perceived to be an inconsistency between my response strategy and the grading system I used for my 105 section (I assigned a grade to each one of the unit papers separately). Grades seem to always carry an air of finality to students: it seems to me that, once a grade is assigned to a piece of writing, that piece becomes, for most of the practical purposes of the student, an artifact, an unalterable "product" that can be saved or discarded, but never revised. If I really want students to take our exchanges seriously as knowledge-constituting, continuing dialogue, then I will need to develop a method of assigning course grades which can evaluate the entire body of their work (the sum total and the final product of our conversations together) in ways which encourage the continual revision of individual "artifacts"‹an encouragement that Bartholomae and Petrosky call "the motive to "counterfactuality" (8).

Finally, based on my experiences with trying to implement a more informed response strategy several weeks into the semester, it seems to me that the beginning of a course might be an especially important time for instituting the necessary underpinnings for a successfully "dialogic" course. I am afraid that some of the difficulties that my students have had with accepting their "responsibility of having something to say" (Bartholomae and Petrosky, 1) can be traced to the conceptual inconsistencies that characterized the assumptions about writing pedagogy with which I began the semester. Without an explicit theory of composition in hand, I began the semester eager to help students produce "correct" texts, willing to provide perhaps too much direction as students wrote their first college papers, and in so doing may have given, or at least reinforced, the impression that what really mattered about student writing was not its knowledge-constituting capacity, but rather its conformity to a standard‹an impression which later manifested itself in student apologies for misreadings that I considered productive. I am inclined to agree with Bartholomae and Petrosky when they write that "a course in reading and writing whose goal is to empower students must begin with silence, a silence students must fill. It cannot begin by telling students what to say" (7).