By Kayla Matzek
Writing lecturer Kathy Patterson recently shared with colleagues her research into the educational value of blogging, at the 3rd annual celebration of the Charles Bazerman Endowed Faculty Fellowship for Professional Development in Writing.
Patterson was the 2018 – 2019 recipient of the research fellowship, generously donated by UC Santa Barbara education professor Chuck Bazerman, who attended the talk at Mosher Alumni House. Patterson’s presentation was titled, “Blogging, Belonging, and Building a Community of Writers - The Pedagogical Potential of Blogs in First-Year College Writing Courses.”
“There’s some work on studying blogging as a subject,” Patterson said, as she outlined what she has learned about the benefits of incorporating blog writing into college courses. “We can look at it, using the reading of blogs as a way of teaching special concepts outside of writing.”
Patterson passed out a recent lesson plan for a blogging assignment she has done with one of her writing courses, in the hope it would encourage her colleagues to incorporate blogging as a teaching method.
UCSB writing professor Kathy Patterson sharing her research on the benefits of blogging in first-year college writing courses during the 2019 celebration of the Charles Bazerman Endowed Faculty Fellowship for Professional Development in Writing. Photo by Karina Lucero Aleman .
The Bazerman fellowship supports an annual, competitive, two-course release for a continuing lecturer in the Writing Program, essentially offering the faculty member a research sabbatical. Charles Bazerman, professor of Education of the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, donated $300,000 to create this fund in order for UCSB writing lecturers to do further research in their field.
“[I’m grateful for] the gift of time,” Patterson said as she thanked Bazerman for the opportunity to be freed up from teaching in order to carry out research. “It’s something pretty unfamiliar to faculty in a teaching unit like the writing program,” she said.
Writing Program director Madeline Sorapure introduced Patterson and praised the Bazerman fellowship as a wonderful idea. “Faculty who have a heavy teaching load get an opportunity to step away from the classroom, take some time to reflect, and then pursue a research question that comes from the classroom,” she said. “You get to hear about some really fabulous pedagogical research. It benefits colleagues in the writing program, and we are very grateful for this gift.”
UCSB professor of education Charles Bazerman congratulating writing professor Kathy Patterson on receiving the 2019 Endowed Faculty Fellowship for Professional Development in Writing. Photo by Karina Lucero Aleman.
Kathy Patterson currently teaches lower division writing courses that focus on low income and first generation students, and upper division courses such as Writing for the Humanities and Community Writing. She earned her PhD in Disabilities Studies at UCSB, and served as a research assistant for Bazerman during her graduate studies. Patterson said she credits Bazerman for teaching her how to be a good colleague.
In her talk, Patterson broke down her four threads of research on blogging: motivation, the writing process, digital literacy, and the community. Patterson said that sometimes blogging is not taken seriously enough.
“Now, blogging is pretty much old 2.0 technology and I guess you might say there’s still a need for making a case for it,” she said. She has noticed that many believe it is a writing technique that “anyone can do,” because of its contextual freedom. “So that sits in the back of my mind as I’m thinking about the research and teaching practices I’m doing.”
UCSB writing professor Kathy Patterson sharing her blogging assignments with colleagues to show blogging’s educational potential as a social, collaborative, and purposeful activity. Photo by Karina Lucero Aleman.
Patterson believes blogging can open the door to exploring the writing process and various writing genres in interesting and different ways. “I’ve started to see blogging as affording opportunities for students to engage in writing as a social, collaborative, and purposeful activity,” she said. She wants to encourage her students “to see writing as not just an assignment, but as a rhetorical, social act of communication.”
Over the past decade Patterson has used blogging assignments in a variety of forms and writing purposes in both lower and upper division writing courses. Blogging, she says, is a way to move away from pen and paper and replace it with technology. “[From] in class writing, to focused free writes, to journaling, to reader response journals—they’re all designed to get students engaged in course work and get them to participate and collaborate,” she said.
“More recently I’ve begun to see blogging as a medium through which students can implicitly or explicitly be introduced to threshold concepts in writing studies,” Patterson said. Her Bazerman fellowship research reflects how blogging can be beneficial to first-year college writing students by fostering their engagement in multiple communities through their blog posts.
“They post a blog post once a week and respond to peers, exposing them to the community of the classroom,” she said. Having the students share with broader communities like the student’s local community, she said, makes their writing stronger and more confident as they write in, with, and for communities in this collaborative blogging endeavor.
Patterson plans to continue what she started during her fellowship year. “I’m kind of in the middle,” she said of her progress. “I’m in the process of putting the pieces together, figuring out what I’ve learned, what I haven’t learned, and then just going from there.”
Kayla Matzek is a third-year student at UC Santa Barbara, majoring in Writing and Literature. She is a Web and Social Media Intern with UC Santa Barbara’s Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.