The Embodied Playbook: Writing Practices of Student-Athletes

By J. Michael Rifenburg

The Embodied Playbook discovers a new approach to understanding student literacy in a surprising place: the university athletics department. Through analysis of a yearlong case study of the men’s basketball team at the University of North Georgia, J. Michael Rifenburg shows that a deeper and more refined understanding of how humans learn through physical action can help writing instructors reach a greater range of students.

Drawing from research on embodiment theory, the nature and function of background knowledge, jazz improvisation, and other unexpected domains, The Embodied Playbook examines a valuable but unexplored form of literacy: the form used by student-athletes when learning and using scripted plays. All students’ extracurricular prior knowledge is vital for the work they undertake in the classroom, and student-athletes understand the strengths and constraints of written text much as they understand the text of game plays: through embodying text and performing it in a competitive space. The book focuses on three questions: What are plays and what do they do? How do student-athletes learn plays? How can teachers of composition and rhetoric better connect with student-athletes?

The Embodied Playbook reveals the literacy of the body as a rich and untapped resource for writing instruction. Given the numbers of students who are involved in athletics, whether intramural, community-related, or extracurricular, Rifenburg’s conclusions hold important implications not only for how we define literacy but also for how writing programs can serve all of their students most effectively.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781607326892

Book preview

The Embodied Playbook

The Embodied Playbook

Writing Practices of Student-Athletes

J. Michael Rifenburg

Utah State University Press

Logan

© 2018 by University Press of Colorado

Published by Utah State University Press

An imprint of University Press of Colorado

245 Century Circle, Suite 202

Louisville, Colorado 80027

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of the Association of University Presses.

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State Colorado University.

∞ This paper meets the requirements of the ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper)

ISBN: 978-1-60732-688-5 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-60732-689-2 (ebook)

https://doi.org/10.7330/9781607326892

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rifenburg, J. Michael, 1982– author.

Title: The embodied playbook : writing practices of student-athletes / J. Michael Rifenburg.

Description: Logan : Utah State University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017025371| ISBN 9781607326885 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781607326892 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: College athletes—Education—United States. | English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching (Higher)—United States. | Learning strategies.

Classification: LCC LC2581 .R54 2017 | DDC 796.04/3092—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025371

The University Press of Colorado gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the University of North Georgia toward the publication of this book.

Front cover concept and illustration by Bradley Huff

To

Albert Jackson Dennen

Granddad, thanks for not letting me play football but always making me talk football.

Contents

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List of Figures

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Studying the Writing Practices of Our Student-Athletes

Section I. Knowing Our Student-Athletes

2. What Are Plays and What Do They Do? A Textual Analysis of Football and Basketball Plays

3. How Do Student-Athletes Learn Plays? A Case Study of a Division II Men’s Basketball Team

Section II. Teaching Our Student-Athlete Writers

4. How Can We Better Teach Our Student-Athlete Writers (Part 1)? A Narrative of a Division I Writing Center

5. How Can We Better Teach Our Student-Athlete Writers (Part 2)? Writing Practices as Jazzy, Creative, Collaborative

References

About the Author

Index

Figures

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2.1 Auburn’s scripted football play Cov. 4 Play Action.

2.2 West Virginia’s scripted football play Reo 37.

2.3 Michigan State’s scripted basketball play 54 Fist.

2.4 Arizona State’s scripted basketball play Nike.

2.5 Oklahoma’s 1942 scripted football play.

2.6 Auburn football coaches signaling a defensive play.

2.7 The trajectory of a college football play.

2.8 West Virginia football coaches signaling an offensive football play.

2.9 Auburn’s defensive formation.

2.10 A West Virginia defensive football player.

3.1 The University of North Georgia’s 2014–2015 basketball roster.

3.2 Head basketball coach Chris Faulkner drawing a play.

3.3 Sean Brennan’s drawing of the scripted basketball play Ear.

3.4 Head basketball coach Chris Faulkner drawing a play.

3.5 Scouting reports notes written by head basketball coach Chris Faulkner.

3.6 Screenshot of iPhone notes written by head basketball coach Chris Faulkner.

3.7 T. J. Williams’s drawing of scripted basketball play Up 4.

Acknowledgments

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My near decade-long research into student-athlete writing practices began by chance. As an incoming MA student at Auburn, I was asked by Michelle Sidler to coteach an FYC class largely populated by first-year student-athletes. As the hot Alabama summer stubbornly gave way to autumn, I watched highly decorated football players excel on the playing field and struggle in our writing class. And I wondered why. Certainly, there may have been motivation factors and issues of focus and balancing the life of a Division I student-athlete in a prominent athletics program. But I felt there was something more that caused such dissonance between the cognitive space of sport and school. So my reading, writing, and thinking began. After I attended my first CCCC in 2008, I wrote an e-mail message to Chris Anson introducing myself and my research and asking to learn more about the talk he gave at CCCC that year. We bounced e-mails around one July morning, and, looking back, it was the first time someone who wasn’t on my MA committee and to whom I wasn’t married expressed interest in and encouragement for my work. I still have the e-mails. Thanks, Chris. I presented my work a year later for the first time at a graduate-student conference hosted by Ohio State. John Duffy was in the audience and introduced himself. He asked for a copy of my talk, and I was thrilled. Thanks, John. Thanks to Marty Townsend for introducing me to the NCAA president, Mark Emmert, and the former athletic director of Missouri, Mike Alden, at CCCC in St. Louis and for showing me that one can make a career out of (academically) caring for student-athletes.

Much thanks to Julie Huff at Auburn, who hired me to supervise mandatory student-athlete study hours and introduced me to the academic side of college sports. To Kevin Roozen, for listening to my ideas and reading disjointed but passionate seminar papers and an MA thesis on student-athlete literacy. To Tom Nunnally, who helped me with my gnarled prose and then invited me to his backyard to shoot pistols. And to John Bolton, Miriam Clark, Anna Riehl, and former officemate Caroline Wilkinson.

I was fortunate to continue my work at Oklahoma. Much thanks to Jaye Amundson, Katie McIntyre, and Brooke Clevenger, staff members in athletic academic services, and to the athletics director, Joseph Castiglione, for teaching my graduate class on college sports and sitting down for an interview. Much thanks to Michele Eodice and Moira Ozias at the OU Writing Center for offering me a space to think about my ideas and, more important, to learn with other writers. I can’t think of a more welcoming space. Thanks to Catherine Hobbs, Kathleen Welch, and Susan Kates for reading and encouraging my work. To Alan Velie for not tolerating florid sentences, and to Vince Leitch for helping me navigate the publication process. To my graduate-student friends Jerry Stinnett, Shannon Madden, Tara Wood, Ted English, and Rachel Jackson. And, of course, to Chris Carter.

At the University of North Georgia, the athletics department welcomed a curious researcher. Thanks to Margaret Poitevint, Lindsey Reeves, and Chris Faulkner. Thanks to Jon Mehlferber and Kayla Mehalcik for help with the images. To my good friend, Brad Huff, for the cover image. Much thanks to my Friday writing group, where we listened to Tycho and forced words across the screen.

A handshake with Michael Spooner, too. I pitched him the idea for this book on a patio in Tampa, Florida. From that initial meeting, he has helped shaped this book immensely. There is a reason Utah State University Press was the first press I approached with my book. And Michael is a large portion of that reason.

I started this book with three living grandparents and no children of my own. At the end of this writing journey, I have one living grandparent and three children. The words on the page are what you see, but family allows me to get the words onto the screen. This book began in earnest when my oldest, Maddux, was an infant; I received a contract on this book in late August, and the next day my wife told me she was nine weeks pregnant; I finished editing the first draft of this book on Darcy’s second birthday; I submitted the second round of revisions on my wife’s birthday. My wife, Amy, understood why I was still in my office even though it wasn’t a teaching day. My children reminded me that Mario and Minnie Mouse are quite enjoyable and that there is a world, a beautiful world, beyond my computer screen, beyond my research notes, books, and writing. My in-laws allowed me to move my wife from Georgia to Alabama to Oklahoma and back again to Georgia. My parents encouraged my literate development from an early age; one of my fonder memories is learning to read by flipping through Calvin and Hobbes with my dad. That’s how I first learned the word tyrant.

Finally, around the time I graduated from Georgia College with my BA, I visited my grandparents in Lafayette, Louisiana. One evening, my grandfather, an old high-school football coach at Mater Dei High School in California, fell asleep in his armchair watching football. My eyes wandered to his bookshelf. I saw a thin volume forcefully wedged between signed copies of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and Joseph Heller’s God Knows. It was The Corinthian, an undergrad research journal published by Georgia College. My first article, a clunky analysis of the poetic rhythm of Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, was bookmarked in the journal. Even as I type these words many, many years later, I’m still not sure how my grandfather reasoned that my sophomoric (literally and figuratively) work should sit alongside Warren’s and Heller’s. But I find myself constantly heartened by such lofty praise.

I went to visit him at Lafayette General Hospital as I was nearing completion of this book. It was a dark October night. His once large, powerful frame was hidden behind bed sheets, wires, tubes. His vision was spotty at best. He reached out a hand to shake mine, and I silently marveled at the strength still left in a hand that once gripped a football. He asked about my drive to Louisiana and then about my book. I mentioned it was finished, and he gave a silent nod of approval. I drove off into the warm Cajun night and didn’t see him again. Thanks for the nod and the handshake and the love of football and life, Grandpa. I’ll save you some boudin and Guinness.

The Embodied Playbook

1

Introduction

Studying the Writing Practices of Our Student-Athletes

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491,930 student-athletes competed in NCAA sponsored sports in 2016–2017.

—2016–2017 NCAA Sports Sponsorship and Participation Rates Report

As origin stories are critical to how we understand and undertake our work, I start with two origin stories fueling my inquiry into the writing practices of our student-athletes.

Origin story 1: It is my first summer as an MA student at Auburn University, and I am responsible for supervising mandatory study hours for incoming first-year student-athletes. We are in the first floor of the library. Outside, it is a hot, sticky Alabama summer; inside, it is cold, quiet. A handful of student-athletes work on a paper for their success-strategies class, which I am coteaching with a counseling psychology professor. I am walking around checking on progress. I walk up to a highly recruited wide receiver I will call Trey. The success-strategies paper is his first college paper. He is writing it on Notepad, a clunky, plain-text editor included in all versions of Windows since the initial launch of Windows in 1985. I suggest using Word. Trey’s face shows confusion. Talking with him, I learn about his lack of access to technology in his high school and home; I learn about his struggles with writing; I learn about his excitement over being able to start the computer, log on with his new student ID, locate Notepad, and write; I learn of his decorated high-school football career. I leave Trey to Notepad and his writing. My head spins over the palpable disconnect between Trey’s academic and athletic preparedness. Trey leaves Auburn for academic reasons less than a year later.

Origin story 2: Again, the setting is Auburn during my time as an MA student. Researching student-athlete literate practices for my thesis, I gain access to a group of first-year football players, the wide receiver in origin story 1 among this group. They are all taking a first-year writing course I am coteaching with a more experienced PhD student. Once the Institutional Review Board approves my research, I sit down to interview a first-year defensive lineman. Let’s call him Jason. I ask Jason how he learns the team’s complex plays. He tells me a story about being in the locker room early in the season when he voiced frustration aloud with the amount and complexity of the plays. An upperclassman walked over to him. The upperclassman took the cushions off the locker-room sofa and arranged them on the floor in the pattern of a common play Auburn runs. Moving the cushions around the floor, the upperclassman walked Jason through the play’s nuances. Jason learned the play and contributed to Auburn’s success on the field that season.

Two years later, I graduated and began progress toward a PhD at the University of Oklahoma. In my living room in Norman, Oklahoma, with my one-month-old son in my arms, I watched Auburn win the national championship by defeating the University of Oregon under the lights in Glendale, Arizona. Another student-athlete I cotaught in that first-year writing course kicked the game-winning nineteen-yard field goal. I watched him celebrate, my former student. He ran around, his arms held high, his mouth spread in jubilation, his gold necklace dancing against his shoulder pads. Jason, too, celebrated with his teammates. But Trey, Jason’s former teammate and my former student, wasn’t there to celebrate. He had left the school before the season started.

These two origin stories propelled my teaching, research, and service over the past decade at two Division I schools and one Division II school. One a story of struggle, one a story of success. At the time, I knew there was something deeper to these stories. One student-athlete struggled to connect his bodily literacy to the academic classroom, while another leveraged his bodily literacy in unique ways to solve a complex cognitive problem: how do I learn hundreds and hundreds of plays? Bodily literacy and knowing through the body is at the heart of these two origin stories. Unfortunately, since bodily literacy does not often figure into traditional conceptions of academic literacy, composition instructors and the programs and people under which they labor do not often privilege bodily literacy in writing-intensive spaces like an FYC classroom or a writing center. This local dismissal of bodily literacies gives rise to global dismissal in that higher education stakeholders often understand the one-half million student-athletes, student-athletes like Trey and Jason, through a cognitive-deficit model: here is what they cannot do, here is what they don’t know. This misleading model drives mainstream media headlines, provides fodder for campus conversations, social media posts, and listserv threads. I understand I take a quick leap of logic from the classroom to mainstream media headlines decrying student-athlete academic performance, but in the following pages, I argue compositionists can better work with student-athlete writers by understanding their prior knowledge, a prior knowledge honed through bodily engagement with text and through writing practices that privilege the body as a central mode of meaning making.

I don’t naively believe better pedagogical practices of working with student-athlete writers will wash away over a hundred years of stains in the relationship between athletics and academics—stains most clearly visible in the fabric of Division I schools. I soon map this century-long relationship between school and sport but do believe, naively or not, that composition studies has always looked for how to work better with the many unique student populations we are trained and committed to serve. I do believe that despite all the challenges our field endures and has endured, we stay committed to whoever is in our classrooms. I do believe Adam Banks’s (2015) words during a powerful moment in his chair’s address at the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication gathering in Tampa—possibly the most powerful speech I have heard in person. With a rising crescendo, he stressed that we—composition teacher-scholars—served anyhow (271). No matter the budget deficits, marginalization, and ostracization by and from other disciplines, we took care of our students anyhow (271). I do believe engaging with a unique population in a manner of being slow to speak and quick to listen yields reciprocal benefits. The immediate results of knowing our student-athlete writers better may be negligible in term of the national landscape of NCAA athletics. But compositionists play the long game; we serve anyhow.

One year after these two origin stories, I was in New Orleans and walking the halls of my first Conference on College Composition and Communication. Overwhelmed by the sheer size of the conference, my eyes caught the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives booth. Volunteers working the booth capture brief video literacy narratives from conference attendees. These narratives populate an open-access digital archive for instructional and research purposes. A volunteer approached me and invited me to provide one. Into my head popped the origin stories that had altered my view of literacy, learning, higher education, access, college sports. But I couldn’t talk about them just yet. I couldn’t give voice to how my view of literacy specifically changed. Again, I knew there was something there. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. All I could have talked about for the video narrative was what I had witnessed and that what I had witnessed made me say hmmm. I declined and walked on.

A decade later, I am ready to give voice to what I learned that hot, sticky Alabama summer night in the library and during my interview with the defensive lineman Jason.

I am ready to talk about the writing practices of our student-athletes.

To ground this book, I focus specifically on football and men’s basketball because, as I argue throughout these pages, the student-athletes competing in these sports operate within a highly discursive space most evident in how they engage with scripted plays. I define scripted plays in the next chapter; however, to start, I understand scripted plays as multimodal texts created, implemented, and even curated with the public performing body as the central mode of meaning making. Other sports use scripted plays, but for football and men’s basketball, most, if not all, of the bodily public action is undergirded by scripted plays. In articulating the writing practices of our student-athletes, then, I begin with a focus on plays. Plays are textual gateways into understanding how student-athletes know.

Starting with this premise, my proceeding inquiry is threefold: What are plays and what do they do? How do student-athletes learn plays? And, finally, how can we better teach student-athletes based on these findings? These three questions constitute the aims of the following chapters and culminate in a single query that has dogged me since my time working with first-year student-athletes at Auburn: how do student-athletes know?

In The Embodied Playbook: Writing Practices of Student-Athletes, I seek to understand better the Treys and Jasons many of us teach. According to the NCAA Sports Sponsorship and Participation Rates Report (National Collegiate Athletic Association 2017b), 491,930 student-athletes competed in NCAA -sponsored sports during the 2016–2017 academic year. The total student-athlete population has grown 19 percent over the last decade. I can only imagine the numbers will continue rising. The close to one-half million student-athletes have a unique story to tell. Their story will illuminate not only how we approach literacy instruction and theory but also how we approach the most lucrative extracurricular appendage of US higher education: college sports. First, however, we need to look behind the headlines and the ESPN news blips about the wonders and worries of college sports to listen and learn. I can’t help but wonder whether Trey, like Jason, might have stayed at Auburn, might have celebrated the national championship with his teammates if I, or the larger composition studies community, knew more about how student-athletes know. . More important, he might have graduated. Certainly many factors drive retention—still, what if?

The Antagonistic Relationship between Athletics and Academics

In this book, I take this nagging personal question and broaden it to speak to the many institutional and community stakeholders who work with our student-athletes. My personal what if question then becomes how do student-athletes know? And how can we better support their writing development based on what they know? Though my focus is on student-athletes’ writing practices, I am aware that when I step into the waters of student-athletes and academics, I am also stepping into rolling waves of frustration at college athletics for soaring expenditures, countless scandals, and what many perceive to be either a blatant disregard for or an insouciant approach to academic standards. I acknowledge these soaring financial expenditures and scandals and touch on the historically antagonistic relationship between school and sport later in this section.

According to Forbes, the five most lucrative college football teams are all worth more than $100 million each, with the University of Texas at Austin leading the way at $131 million (Smith 2014). I spent four years working in athletic academic services at the University of Oklahoma. The athletics department operates with a roughly $100 million self-sustaining annual budget. Other sports are financially viable because of the