A Review of Preparing Educators for Online Writing Instruction

Preparing Educators for Online Writing InstructionBeth L. Hewett and Christa Ehmann
Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2004
ISBN 0-8141-3665-6    $35.95    pp. 203

Review by Kevin Garrison
Texas Tech University

Introduction
Online Writing Instruction (OWI) remains a field insufficiently explored, researched, and written about in composition studies. Beth L. Hewett and Christa Ehmann attempt to provide a response to absence of OWI literature and offer a comprehensive analysis of current understanding of OWI as well as provide educators with a rubric from which to teach new instructors both OWI theory and practice. The result is a reasonably priced, 200+ page look at writing instruction online, including a theoretical approach to OWI based on current literature as well as practical advice based on their own experiences with SmartThinking, Inc., one of the largest national online writing programs. OWI is broadly defined by the authors as “any online instructional context – networked classrooms, distance learning, e-mail- or Internet-based conferences, or online tutoring” (xi). Such a broad definition allows for any instructor remotely connected to online writing instruction to find something useful in this text. While the book doesn’t offer composition studies any revolutionary ideas regarding how to teach students in an online medium and the book doesn’t provide any quantitative proof for the claims offered within, the book is a step in the right direction for a field that needs a jumping off point from which to work. And in this aspect, Hewett and Ehmann succeed well. The rest of this review will focus on the two parts of the book, providing a brief dissection of the material contained within each section and short, critical analyses when the content calls for it.

Part I
Addressing primarily educators interested in starting their own training program for OWI, the first chapter offers a rubric for the educators to begin working from. Hewett and Ehmann offer five steps to establishing an OWI program: 1) investigation, 2) immersion, 3) individualization, 4) association, and 5) reflection. The result of following these five steps should, as the authors suggest, allow any composition instructor interested in starting their own OWI program to have a foundation from which to begin.
          A foundation, however, must be supported by theory, and this theory is offered in chapter two. While the five steps to developing a training program are somewhat self-evident and seem to be a fairly unimaginative set of guidelines, the value of the book, leastwise for me, began with chapter two, where Hewett and Ehmann provide the reader with both a theoretical justification for online writing programs as well as an introductory literature review of what composition experts have to say regarding online instruction. The premise of their discourse is that there exists a fundamental difference between traditional education and online education, a difference the authors seem to think exists primarily because of the unfamiliar skills needed by instructors to navigate an online environment. This particular premise is unsupported by research and is primarily an assumption that they base the entire book on; however, this assumption is commonly held by the leading experts, and provides the foundation for the rest of the book.
          The first part of chapter two offers an introductory look at social constructivism and its popular connection to OWI. Drawing from such giants in the academic world as Vygotsky, Kuhn, and Bruffee, the authors use these men to provide an epistemological justification for OWI and the corresponding work related to it. Lev S. Vygotsky wrote Thought and Language, which argues that the understanding and use of language is dependent upon social interactions. Thomas Kuhn sought to apply Vygotsky’s argument to the realm of scientific discourse in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the result of which implies that no realm of knowledge is separated from social and linguistic influences. Kenneth Bruffee brings the theoretical understanding of how social influences lead to the construction of knowledge and applies it practically in “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’” an essay which seeks to bring social constructivism into the classroom through collaborative learning. While Hewett and Ehmann regard social constructivism as useful in its own right, the second part of chapter two provides a simple, yet dynamic critique of social constructivism, suggesting that the theory carries the “mixed message of ‘collaborate, but do not appropriate.’” This valuable criticism then allows them to argue that OWI research should have a more eclectic theoretical grounding that uses current-traditional, expressivist, neoclassical, and social-constructivist theories to understand the complex dynamics of OWI.
          While these two chapters are hardly revolutionary, are written in a simplistic style that seems to suggest the audience is fairly new to OWI, and often only reiterate the ideas already commonly associated with OWI, the first part of the book merely sets the stage for the practical advice offered in part two, while providing a semi-detailed look at OWI theory.

Part II
Chapters three through six offer primarily practical advice for approaching both asynchronous (non-real-time) and synchronous (real-time) instruction. Beginning with asynchronous instruction in chapters three through four, Hewett and Ehmann write to two audiences: first, the trainer attempting to offer feedback to inexperienced OWI instructors, and second, to the inexperienced OWI instructors themselves.
          Chapter three attempts to provide a set of guidelines that the trainers can use to critique the quality of their instructors’ commentary, as well as principles that the instructors themselves can use to begin commenting on student writing. Most of this information is not new, and for many composition instructors, seems to have been borrowed from composition practices not associated with online instruction. For example, the advice to give “sincere and accurate feedback” (88) is hardly a concept that is only associated with OWI, and for the most part is somewhat self-evident. What ethical instructor, after all, would purposefully give false feedback? As well, chapter three is somewhat redundant, and by the end of the chapter, the reader has encountered the same advice a number of times. For example, one of the stigmas of writing instruction is to focus on higher level concerns over lower-level concerns, and this idea is encountered in four different locations within chapter three. This particular approach is necessary in the sense that the advice is given in three different contexts; however, the “Summary of Asynchronous Teaching Techniques” says everything in one page, which should be enough for most people wanting to find the meat of the chapter. I was slightly disappointed that the advice offered was merely common composition practices regurgitated, but the value of this chapter is that the summaries allow both trainers and trainees to have a complete list of ideas from which to engage in discussion about the quality of commentary.
          Chapter four includes several sample essays, sample instructor comments, and sample trainer responses to the instructors. The value of this chapter is evident in allowing the reader to see each of the ideas from chapter three used in a practical, clear manner. For instructors new to the online medium, this chapter has enough examples to allow them to see first-hand the ideas presented in chapter three, as well as giving them something to model. From a personal standpoint, I remember the first time I attempted to write a comment to a student in an online environment, and my primary apprehension was that I would write something unhelpful. For new instructors experiencing the same discomfort, chapter four models expert commenting behaviors on actual student essays, thereby allowing the new instructors to have a visual representation of the more abstract ideas in chapter three. Likewise, trainers of new instructors have previously had no basis from which to critique the comments of their trainees, and chapters three and four combined allow both the trainer and trainees to have a common foundational premise from which to engage in fruitful discussion about the quality of the trainees’ commentary.
          While chapters three and four focused on asynchronous communication which doesn’t differ all that much from the current practices of commenting on printed essays with ink, chapters five and six provide principles and models of how to engage with students in real-time environments, such as MUDs, MOOs, and chats. As the authors admit at the beginning of chapter five, synchronous OWI is the least understood of all online communication, and as such, much of the advice given is somewhat generic for people who are used to communicating in this type of online forum. However, for people hesitant to engage in conversations within a synchronous environment, Hewett and Ehmann provide principles and examples for trainers and trainees to follow, much like chapters three and four do.

Conclusion
Hewett and Ehmann desire their book to be used as a guideline for helping administrators design and implement an OWI training program, but the value of the book exceeds such a narrow audience. The literature review in the second chapter reveals the scanty amount of work done to establish the credibility of writing instruction online, and a number of times, the authors directly call researchers to empirically demonstrate the value of OWI and its corresponding principles. As well, the second section of the book serves as an excellent textbook for students of OWI training programs, as the examples, exercises, and guidelines offered within are ideal for people unfamiliar with how to approach writing instruction in an online environment. I personally am a student involved in the implementation of an online writing curriculum, and Hewett and Ehmann’s book has served and will continue to serve as a foundation for my own responses to the students whom I encounter online. While this book does not answer all the questions about online instruction, Preparing Educators for Online Writing Instruction provides a useful rubric for developing an OWI program, shows the necessity of composition instructors and researchers to empirically verify the usefulness of the techniques suggested in the book, and offers practical advice for all instructors writing to their students through an online medium. As such, anyone involved with online instruction should read this book, recognizing that while the scope of the book is somewhat narrow and incomplete, they will likely find a wealth of information available to them from two of the premier OWI experts in the field.