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CCCCs Proposal 2015, Draft 2Cohorts and Risk Management

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Whether through living-learning communities or Stretch Composition courses, cohort

systems in which students remain together in the same classes across two or more semesters areamong the most successful pedagogical strategies for at-risk and experienced writing students(Glau et al.). ASU's "Stretch" program, for example, raised pass rates from 87% to 92% and 80%

to 86% , respectively, in its sequential first year composition classes, and helped increaseretention rates from 28% to 46%. This panel demonstrates the value and limits of writing cohorts

through institutional, economic, and philosophical critique.

While cohorts have been shown to work, Speaker #1 asks why cohorts work, a topic which hasreceived little attention in recent research. Linda Adler Kassner's, John Majewski's, and Damian

Koshnicks suggestion of threshold theory as a way to view writing between disciplinesprovides an epistemological rationale for interdisciplinary cohorts. What Meyer and Land refer

to as preliminal troublesome knowledge serves as an instigative feature that unsettles allprevious understanding and induces a state of liminality. The familial learning community or

supportive social context of cohorts enhances a sense of security and relatedness necessary forstudents to abandon prior conceptual stances and make irreversible epistemic transpositions that

alter future learning across disciplines. The recursive nature of a transformative threshold can becomplicated by what students feel is an uncomfortable shift of identity, or even a sense of loss.

Cohorts help to ease and nurture students in these struggles. They provide regular groups thatafford them safe places to fail. The speaker's aim will be to show how interdisciplinary threshold

concepts are one explanation of why cohorts are beneficial to university students within thegeneral education or core curriculum.

Speaker #2 provides a cohort epistemologythat demonstrates in analytic terms why writing

students who remain together over two or more semesters and between disciplines tend to dobetter academically. One explanation for cohort success might be found in the epistemology

suggested by a recent pragmatist philosophy of language. Robert Brandom argues thatconceptual content should be framed inferentiallyrather than absolutelyand posits a social

modelof reciprocal recognition that defines normative status as the collapse of authority andresponsibility:

Normative status = Attitude of X {to undertake responsibility} + Y {to exerciseauthority} Attitude of X

1{to hold responsible} + Y

1{to acknowledge authority}

Following Brandom, this paper illustrates how cohort success could be seen as one manifestationof Hegelian symmetric (two-sided) parity in meaning-making, when the authoritative one and

responsible one coincide and students engage in peer learning. Cohort symmetryis a positiveleap from Kants autonomy thesis, an obedience model that construes the reciprocal notions

of authority in a one-sided way. The speaker concludes that an analytic understanding of thecohort is a powerful corrective to the pedagogically damaging cartesian picture of academic

achievement (understanding) as the turning on of some kind of inner light. Cohorts suggestinstead practical mastery through social reciprocity that yieldsself-reflexiveawareness of

risk andrisk management with implications for students beyond the composition classroom.

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Speaker #3 employs Robert Brandom's observation of a complex relationship between semantic

and pragmatic approaches to a philosophy of language to one specific cohort group at TiffinUniversity. Brandom argues that pragmatics expands the analytic semantic project by asserting

that the meaning of a term originates in its use. Propositional claims, then, can also be relational

claims made upon the hearer, a means of both making and staking ones claims or rights. In thispaper, Brandom's pragmatism will be brought to bear on the public discourse taking place duringa Freshman Honors Seminar held during the Spring 2014 semester titled "Romantic

Psychologies and Literatures." This course is particularly apropos to an analysis of riskmanagement through cohort formation as the honors seminar is this University's first cohort

experiment, and as students participated in public discourse through a publicly visible blog on aweekly basis. As members of a cohort, these students became members of a newly-formed

institutional community that became the basis of close bonds among these students. At the sametime, this new community's values were often at odds with the values of their originary homes

and communities. Student discourse on the blog about hot button issues will be analyzedfollowing the principles of Brandom's pragmatism to illustrate some of the tensions between

home and institutional identities during cohort formation, particularly as they exist for freshmanstudents.

Speaker #4 examines how cohort systems in the undergraduate sector function as a means of risk

management by improving student retention and the universitys long-term stability. TiffinUniversity recently requested an audit by the John N. Gardner Institute to initiate a process of

improving first-year retention. This study examines the suggestions that Tiffin University facultyreceived for improving students first-year experiences and the universitys response. Results of

the institutional audit suggested that buy-in and academic support are the key factors inimproving the first-year experience of students. In response, the university established a cohort

system and several freshman level core courses aimed at improving retention. Working fromthe hypothesis that Tiffin Universitys assigned cohorts can be theorized as networks,Speaker #4

draws from Latour, Engestrm, Russell, and Spinuzzi to complicate the assertion that success ofassigned cohorts must be dependent upon university-wide buy-in and academic support. This

presentation highlights an ongoing nine-month qualitative study that examines the relationshipsthat develop within these assigned cohorts during the participating students first academic year,

ultimately theorizing these emerging networks through activity and/or actor network theory,depending on the qualities of the relationships evident in the data ,and the behavior of the

network(s). The results of this study will speak to the feasibility of the use of cohort systems as ameans of risk management within the university.