On Laptops in Classrooms

Here's an interesting article I read recently on the use of laptops in law classrooms.  Obviously this is a different setting than in undergrad classrooms, but still pertinent in thinking about the issue.

Wahutu, via Robin

its been an interesting week since we talked about essay writing. I still feel that essay writing is important for students as it helps them to learn how to sustain an argument and make a point by coming with authoritative support for their arguments. A student in my class threw a conniption last Thursday upon receiving an essay prompt in our American Race Relations class. The student was mad since according to him we "hadn't discussed race and race relations since all we had talked about was Whiteness for the past three weeks."  As evident from this he views 'White' as not being a racial group. Upon scheduling an appointment with him i asked to make his case in his essay and come up with a convincing one. In his opinion, asking him to  do this in an essay didn't not make sense. The irony is that on our facebook group, he has been talking about dealing with White priviledge and the idea of whiteness and what it means to be white. Yet last week, talking about Whiteness did not constitute talking about race relations in America. While I do not say this to highlight my bias for essays, I'm baffled at why his argument would be different on Facebook and why he can't write an essay as to why whiteness is not a topic to write about in an essay. perhaps most frustrating, he emailed the grad instructor saying she was not 'qualified' to be teaching the class and i wasn't 'qualified' to be the TA for this class. Since the former is interested in intersectionality of race class gender on the GLBT community and I'm interested in ethnicity and race and how conflicts in Africa are talked about in the West.

Reflections on the Essay

I've been thinking about this a lot since Robin asked us to write on "the essay." I read some articles (this one in the NYtimes is relevant and worth a read), used another "new medium," Facebook, to try to crowd-source a discussion on the utility of the essay among my Facebook friends (more on that later), and sought out the syllabi of individuals whose writing I adore (see this one by David Foster Wallace).

But before I get to all that, I'd like to begin with a discussion of...definitions. This feels at once nerdy and ironically appropriate for the stereotyped 5 paragraph essay form. As in, "What do I think about free speech? Well, the Greeks defined free speech as..." But indulge me. Here are the definitions of "essay" from "thefreedictionary.com", which seem representative:

1. (s)

a. A short literary composition on a single subject, usually presenting the personal view of the author.

b. Something resembling such a composition: a photojournalistic essay.

2. A testing or trial of the value or nature of a thing: an essay of the students' capabilities.

3. An initial attempt or endeavor, especially a tentative attempt.

With definition 1, we get the stereotypical version of our 5 paragraph essay. I think we can all agree that not all, probably not even most college writing falls into this category, but some of it does. Here's what some of my friends had to say about this (quoted here anonymously because I did not obtain permissions to take this "off Facebook"). My post asked: "Tell me, facebookverse, what do you think of "the essay" as an assignment in a college course? What has your experience been with writing them or assigning them? Was it a useful exercise? What would you change?":

"As a grad student, useless, I write them while watching tv. At this point in my educational career, I am able to figure out what the prof wants to read, and write it. As a teacher, I think writing assignments should have authentic audiences...." 

"I hate "reflective" or "responsive" essays with a passion as it seems to be all I write these days. This far along in my degree, I'm not feeling like there is much use for them except to have some sort of grade in the grade book."

"From personal experience, I had many great humanities teachers from middle school to college that stressed the importance of structured writing and argumentation through the traditional essay, and I think their doing so helped me succeed through various stages of education."

What to draw from these diverse responses? To use the popular internetspeak of the day, I don't think we say FAIL essay, I think we say FAIL assignment instructions or guidelines. I tend to agree with Robin; it is all in the prompt.

David Foster Wallace identifies this learned behavior in his syllabus (linked above) and presumably attempted (RIP) to counter this tendency in his classrooms, to help students relearn to write (as others have noted):

Let's move on now to definitions 2 and 3 of "essay": a "test or trial," an "initial attempt or endeavor." I find these definitions more thought provoking. What do we want students to get out of "the essay," or, to expand things a bit, any piece of college writing?

I think it is important to have "essays" in this sense -- initial attempts at tackling big ideas. But I think it is also important to give students opportunities to refine these "initial attempts" or "test trials." I think that those of us who have given students rewriting assignments, where they rework a paper they have already submitted, realize that this is a task many students are unfamiliar with because they are rarely asked to perform it -- a "return to the scene of the crime" for some students. How do we clean this up? Make it better?

A few final thoughts in disjointed form:

• I think form or forum matters less than the assignment guidelines, or how we set it up.
• Blogs probably have the potentially to be just as disciplinary (if not more so) as essays. One point that was brought up in my crowd-sourced discussion was the new trend of "forcing" individuals on the academic job market to have blogs for the sake of "professionalization."
• A lot of the criticisms of the essay seem to stem from an over-reliance on "personalized" narratives and opinions that some either find tiresome, pointless, or performed. I think that here we should take Jackie's narrative speech as a great example of how to include personal experiences and opinions in the classroom in a structured and productive manner. I think her assignment avoids a lot of these traps.
• It's not revolutionary, but worth saying: the best classrooms are probably multi-modal, allowing students different ways of participating and expressing their ideas. When I've used blogs as an instructor, I've used them less as an analog for essays and more as a supplement to in-class participation. Not all students are comfortable with vocal expression of more controversial ideas, and that's just fine with me.
• Critical thinking. How to get more of it back into the essay? My personal experience has suggested that rhetorical criticism assignments force students to create new arguments that they have ownership over.

There you have it: rhetorical criticism saves the essay the world. The End.

Just kidding...sort of.

Using Essays and Other Forms of Writing

I believe that being able to write well in an academic setting is important, and I would absolutely assign my students essays if it suited the goals of whatever course I was teaching.  I think students (and instructors) should be able to work within many different forms of expression, and for people in academia, that obviously includes essays.  As long as students are at school (at least for the foreseeable future), they will be asked to write essays, so additional opportunities to practice those skills and get feedback from others are necessary.  And, as some of my fellow students have noted, being able to make a clear, sustained argument in writing is a skill developed by the essay and applicable to other forms of writing and speaking.  On the other hand, I can imagine courses where writing a formal essay wouldn't (necessarily) be helpful for achieving course goals, but writing, say, lab reports or lesson plans would be.  It would still be important for students to think through why they're writing those things and why they're writing them the way they are, and to be able to express those reflective thoughts to others, but that might be accomplished through informal journaling, one-on-one conferences, or regular in-class small group discussion.

The one university-level course that I've had experience teaching addressed the foundations of education (history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and politics), and we did assign our students a final essay in which they would analyze a school using the course concepts, attempting to synthesize everything.  This activity was pretty successful, and became more so once I started building time into class for students to talk to each other and me about their paper ideas and early drafts.  The students appreciated the in-class work time, as they found that sometimes a question wouldn't come up for them until they'd started working, and then when they had a question, they could immediately ask me or another student.  They were definitely more comfortable about writing the essay the semester I instituted this practice.  In the future I'd like to find more ways to get more of them thinking more deeply about their analyses, rather than staying at a surface or maybe mid-range level.  I think that taking additional time to directly model that type of analytical thinking and behavior in class would help, walking them through my thought process as I did a sample analysis, so they'd know exactly what I'm looking for.  I could even record myself doing that and put it up on Moodle for students who missed class or wanted to review the process.

The Essay as "Deliberate Conflict"

I like Noolifar's post a lot--especially the benefits of the "opportunity of obligation" that being forced to learn (and conform) to a certain technical form can have. When I started grad school (in Rhetoric) I surrounded myself with articles by rhetorical critics I admired-Mike Leff, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Brad Vivian, Dave Kaufer-and copied what they did. That is, when they inserted history in their article, I inserted history in my article. When they worked in their lit review, I'd work in my lit review. By copying the form of an academic article (in Rhetoric) I learned how to write one. Eventually, I became confident enough that I was freed from the form, able to produce work without looking at the work of others for comparison. I like assigning essays to my students for this very reason. I also like assigning them other sorts of forms depending on the class. In my Freshman Comp class, I might assign essays, but also other forms that my students might find useful--short arguments, blog posts, even some work on how to do basic coding schemes for language.

Unless it is absolutely un-ignorable, I generally do not grade grammatical errors; instead, I correct them and point out to the student that he/she might work on them. My grade focuses on the issues they raise and they style with which they raise them. This philosophy stems from Joseph Williams' essay, "The Phenomenology of Error," where he proved that "people read student writing with a different screen from the one they use for published writing." We read for error when we read student writing but for ideas when we read professional academic writing.

Finally, a word on discussions: in response to Robin's point (in his email "An essai on essays") that essays/discourse are performed, I wholeheartedly agree. Just like with speeches in my Public Speaking class, I like to discuss my student's essays with them in class. I never give them public criticism (I feel it can be too damaging if it goes poorly); instead, we engage the issues that their speeches/essays brought up. I feel like pushing back against them. This is tough sometimes, perhaps because, as Patricia Roberts-Miller points out, "hostility to argument often comes from experience with unproductive forms of conflict" (Deliberate Conflict: Argument, Political Theory, and Composition Classes, p. 185). Still, I believe that, if I can make it through the first wave of built-up resistance to talking about their essays, I end up having very productive discussions with my students. The effectiveness of the essay, to me, lies in what you do after they've turned the assignment in. Without that discussion, that group engagement with the issues they write about, I'm not sure how effective I might find it.

David

Niloofar's post

I’m sorry I missed last week’s discussion regarding assignments, I’m sure I could benefit a lot form your viewpoints in formulating my own, here. However, I thinkI would vote for “assigning essays”. And I can mainly justify my opinion by going back to my own experience: I was never asked to write an essay till very late; my first year in graduate school! I know… it is quite odd! But this is how the educational system works in Iran, at least at undergraduate level. Although I had some experiences in writing for journals or magazines before my first official essay assignment, those were hugely different in the sense that they were voluntary and optional. As I think back I see that what made essay writing an exceptional and sometimes an ecstatic experience for me was actually the very “obligation”. I very much valued this opportunity or rather this “obligation” of presenting my thought, working on it and expanding it, knowing that someone will read it thoroughly to evaluate it. If I’m obliged to write then it means that someone is obliged to read.

However, I do not mean to generalize my own feeling about essay writing. I strongly agree with Robin when he says “we all hated doing them (well, maybe not us....)”, i.e., his hint about the possible differencesbetween us and them in our attitude towards essay writing. But what I think I can say without extrapolating my opinion is this: everyone should be given this opportunity of ‘obligation’, and not once or twice but more. Being asked to sit in front of a blank paper, per se, I think, is quite potential in bringingforth an ecstatic experience and thus everyone should give it a shot.

I sound pretty traditional in the last few lines and I think I will sound even more tradition here, so I keep it short! I think a couple of quizzes are also necessary to smooth the path for essay writing- just to make sure that students know what the key concepts are and how to use them as their thinking tools. So, I should confess I’m not saying anything original here!! I’m only trying to think why the traditional '2 essays and 2 tests' model has been used for so long now and why it still make sense to me.

On the essay

I am not the most gifted when it comes to being conversant with technology. Hence, I have a certain hesitation when it comes to moodle and the like. Not because they are not suited for the purpose, but because my technological dyslexia prevents me from venturing that way. I vote in favor of the essay as my preferred tool for an intellectual/academic exercise. I am aware that part of this nepotism has to do with my old-fashioned quasi-British education. Even then, cultural baggage and the ghost of the empire past notwithstanding, I do think that the essay as a form is the most malleable and hence, best suited for our purpose. The essay could be anything, and here I go back, once again, to my literary studies roots. It could be the personal essays of Charles Lamb, the stuffy armchair essays of Montaigne, the pulpit essays of Bacon and so on. It is a form that lends itself to the most profane and to the most arcane of subjects with remarkable ease. It is the best tailored for creating the skill of making sustained arguments. I am aware that most students will not go on to write essays in their workplaces, but it is not merely an attempt at good writing, but more importantly, it is an exercise is thinking in a streamlined, organized fashion. That skill I am sure will be useful in whatever profession they might enter. It is the mode of thought that I endorse more than its execution on paper. There is a certain logicality in the essay that short responses to prompts do not always generate. It is in trying to tap on this analytical tendency that the essay generates that makes me latch onto it more than any other format of academic exercise.

U of M Active Learning Classrooms

Given our topic of technology this week, I thought you all might be interested in the U's new(ish) Active Learning Classrooms.  I taught in one of these classrooms for a year, and they have both good points and bad, just like traditional classrooms.  The U recently published a self-congratulatory article about how great the ALCs are, and make the argument that based on one research study, they can say conclusively how effective ALCs are in improving student learning (an assertion that I find astonishing, even given my relatively limited knowledge of statistical significance, sample sizes, and etc.).  They also talk about how much students love these classrooms, when there are certainly plenty of students who dislike them, as can be seen from the comments on the U's posting of this news article on Facebook (scroll down to find the post on 2/23).

Many small things

Continuing my aphoristic tradition of advice that will fit in a fortune cookie:

• what if you DO want them to 'write good essays' by the end of the course? (and it's by no means clear to me that this is a good main goal in 2012--we can discuss PowerPoint decks later)

• you KNOW that if you just 'assign essays' several really bad things will happen:

1. the skilled will flourish, as they always do--because of what they brought in the room on the first day.  The unskilled will fail, as they know they will, and as they always do--reifying patterns of class and power.

2. they 'won't read the instructions'--or so it will seem, because as the Manoa folks found, we all revert to what worked before.  So you won't get your assignment; you'll get an aggregate of a lot of bad high-school experiences.

3. you will be unhappy, because the wonderful engagements with (whatever) will not happen.  And you will not get chili peppers.

• A way out.  A road not taken. A different path.  Another drummer.  [insert relevant cliche here]:

--many small and different experiences, all of which--taken together--add up to the composite literacy abilities that constitute 'academic literacy,' and a good deal more.

--key idea: literacies, are built by lots of disparate experiences, some of which don't appear, at first, to go directly to literacy:  sorting data, solving problems, telling stories, drawing diagrams, acting parts / taking roles, writing audience 'profiles,' making playlists, parody, immitatio, reading visual rhetoric, free association--hardly matters what, as long as there's LOTS and it's DIFFERENT and it's SMALL.  Low stakes.  Variation (so different Gardener-ish 'multiple intelligences' can come to bear).  Sequenced and articulated.

--minimal advice: segment big projects (like sustained essays) into small, constituent parts, each of which gets some sort of feedback--from you, or better: from them, in collaborative projects.

This is the idea behind our 'List' on the Archive.  Small, fun, focused things to do in and out of class.

Ending Up Where We Started...

I think Shannon really hit the nail on the head when she emphasized the fact that the 5-paragraph essay (and yes, I realize that this is just one of the many kinds of essays) is "just one way of doing things, not the best way, not the worst way." Maybe introducing this thought to students would actually be liberating for them (and for us), and prompt them to apply that so-rarely-used critical apparatus that we're constantly trying to get them to use.

Will I have my students write essays? Yes. But, like Shannon, I plan to introduce the essay as just one way to write. I have no idea what I'll be teaching in the near future, but hopefully I'll be designing my own first-year writing course, and I plan to take an audience-based approach for each writing assignment. The important question here will be: What is the most effective way to get your point across to [audience x]? For something like literary analysis, an essay with a thesis statement at the end of the intro paragraph, with three paragraphs of evidence/quotes, and a concluding paragraph, is perhaps the most effective/efficient way to get your point across. But maybe there are different ways to get there - maybe the process of writing essays can change. Instead of creating an assignment sheet with a prompt and throwing caution to the wind, maybe the research process can be more collaborative and productive than simply outlining (or, more likely, throwing a bunch of quotes and shallow analysis together the night before the paper is due). Something like a wiki, where students could introduce and respond to each other's potential arguments and pieces of evidence, might be useful here. I suppose we might run into issues of "borrowing" others' materials/ideas here, but at least the student wouldn't feel completely isolated when staring at the blinking cursor and the blank Microsoft Word page as she starts to write - because, in fact, she has already begun the writing process, albeit in another medium.

I have to admit that I feel like kind of a sell-out for having the end result be a (very) standard essay, but how the hell else are they supposed to write a sustained argument about literature? Is reinvigorating the process enough to reduce the alienation they feel when writing in this format? And do they really feel alienated (because they're presumably very familiar with this format...although sometimes their writing would indicate otherwise...)?

Anil's post

Hello,

I must confess that I am anti-blog, twitter, moodle, and the like. The reason is not that I don’t see any value whatsoever in such things but rather that I myself am largely incompetent in such areas. I could learn but lack both the time – and, moreover, the inclination. I am, however, trained and competent in essay writing. My position, then, as a staunch proponent of the essay should come as no surprise.

What is an essay?

The Form resists any attempt at predication – so I shan’t dare.

Concerning the politics and history of the form.

How does this form inherently resist the articulation and elaboration of certain ideas? Put otherwise, How do other media allow you to approach your object in a way that is unavailable through, or perhaps even precluded by, the essay?

Essays: Setting up a Defensive Perimeter

Well, perhaps calling it a "defensive perimeter" is a wee bit o'er the top.

Or is it?

Let me begin by saying that I would be unlikely to object loudly when faced with instructors who believe it best NOT to teach students how to write a standard academic essay. However, I have yet to be convinced that it does the students any favors to leave this particular skill off the menu of requirements for a quality liberal arts degree.

OK, I get it--the five-paragraph essay could be one of many ways to reinforce structural norms. It is but one way to write and think--not the only way, not even the best way. But here's my problem with tossing it beneath a passing truckload of Freire, Shorr, or even Foucault texts as we strive to liberate and transcend young minds into something more, something better: it is a very, very useful way to write and think.

From the most practical standpoint, it could surely be argued that teaching students the five-paragraph essay (or another traditional form of essay) will help them to succeed in academics and in the "real" world, where written reports/requests/etc. are a daily exercise for many. From a more high-minded viewpoint, though, it still has value. Every time we teach a student to think and write in a particular way (especially one that is built on a logical, progressive argument), we have given them a new way to relate to the world. Not the only way, but one way--and a way that is just about universally helpful when clear communication is desired with those in power and those without.

Teaching a student to write and think through traditional essay style merely opens some doors; it does not close them. It seems to me that to argue that we are closing off or limiting the students by teaching them this basic communication skill shows a lack of faith in the intellect of those we instruct. It is not as if once a student has learned to write a classic essay that student will become an automaton unable to spin lines of poetry or rap about the oppressed. To the contrary, I would argue that the more ways we can guide our students to think and write, the further along the path to truly creative and life-changing transcendence they will be.

I am fairly certain that Beethoven did not feel limited by his classical training in music. And I know that he started his creative journey writing simple sonatas, fugues and rondos, showcasing his creative brilliance from within a highly structured form. It was decades before he took those early skills, practiced often and tempered by his life experiences, into the realm of symphony writing. I do not believe he could have achieved his symphonies had he not first mastered the sonata.

Yeah, maybe Beethoven is a far-out example. But the point is not: knowledge, like skill, builds through exposure, practice, and time. Knowing one thing does not limit our ability to know another; if anything, it opens us up to more ways of knowing.

Here's the thing--we can tell our students that the five-paragraph essay is just one way of doing things; not the best way, not the worst way. Just one way. One way that is quite helpful for exploring new ideas and communicating those ideas to others. I always tell my students just that. And I'm good humored about the process of (re)learning to write the essay (the video link in the slides I have below always makes them giggle...but then they take notes). If you want to see how I have approached it in a past class, feel free to check out these example slides from a past lecture on the subject.

I love teaching writing. And I enjoy seeing students develop the ability to write clearly and concisely.

And so my defense perimeter stands.

Essai on 'Essays' -- Take a shot

Let's write about writing essays.  I think it's the most 'open' topic in literacy research; from here you can go anywhere.  Without 'assigning an essay,' I'm proposing that we share our thoughts on what we began on Wednesday.  Will you 'teach the essay'?  Will you 'assign essays?'  Why (in my Department) do most of the courses revert to the '2 essays and 2 tests' model--even though we all hated doing them (well, maybe not us....) and we seem to fail to learn from the fact that most essay assignments produce a pile of really debilitating crap to read.

My first thoughts--sketchy, essai-ish, making strong claims (as I claim essays do), inviting disagreement (as I claim essays do), making me anxious that I'll be found dumb, wrong or worse (as I claim essays do).

And a lot more....

• Essays; a set of Robin-claims, in no particular order:

--Essay does not refer to a singular entity.  When we talk about 'essays,' we're pretty much assured that we aren't talking about the same things.  We need to tease out the many things operating when we say 'I think they need to learn to write an adult, professional essay.'

--Essays (and all discursive forms or genres) have a history, and that history is encoded in the ways they structure information and set relations among users. They encode a worldview.  They are particular and 'local' (Clifford Geertz).  Because of this, there's always an occulted politics in any discursive form.   Scollon and Scollan's notion of 'essay / text literacy' is a reminder of the particularity (and costliness) of the ways of talking, reading and writing that we find so natural (and our students often find so foreign and hard).  I'm writing this on the computer, one draft.  I'll go back and mess around a little, but basically I can make an essay dead drunk having just rolled out of bed at 3:00 AM if I need to.  And it won't be too bad.  (And I have never rolled out of bed dead drunk; in fact, never been -- but the metaphor holds; I inhabit an essay-structured body and mind.  And it's a good body and mind to have if you work in a university.)  Here's a good summary from Paul Gee's great overview article (731), where he traces essay structure to Enlightenment thinkers who were:

among the first to exploit writing for the purpose of formulating original theoretical knowledge. . . . Knowledge was taken to be the product of an extended logical essay—the output of the repeated application in a single coherent text of the technique of examining an assertion to determine all of its implications. (pp. 268-269)

This form of literacy is the basis, ideologically, if not always in
practice, of our schools and universities. Claims for literacy per se
are often in fact tacit claims for essay-text literacy, a form of literacy
that is neither natural nor universal, but one cultural way of making
sense among many others. Of course, this way of making sense is
associated with mainstream middle-class and upper middle-class
groups and is, in fact, best represented by the ideology and
sometimes the practice of academics, the people who most often
make claims for it.

Not a 'bad' form or history; not 'bad' ideologically; not set in opposition to some neutral or better form (ain't none).  But structuring, political, value-setting, class-dividing and very, very local and particular.  And hard to master, unless you grew up in the right place.  Athabascan Indians really don't.  But I'm guessing you don't need to go to Lake Athabaska to find students pretty alienated from this way with words.

--We confuse essays (or school essays, or academic essays) with a set of skills or discourse competences that may well be useful, highly-valued and politically important (Freire's basic claim).  Things like: ability to sustain a long argument (or read one); syntactic ability necessary to encode complex arguments (like dialectic, say); love of intellectual debate; ability to present and defend ideas (and dominate); vocabulary; ability to fit words to worlds (audiences); ability to sort and order data; range of 'rhetic' or 'genre' competences (can make different kinds of structures).  And, and, and.  Got to tease these out, name 'em, and figure out how to help students get them--and not necessarily by writing a lot of bad essays at which they fail over and over.

--Essays--and all discourse--are enacted / performed.  The SAT's (which determine lives) are overwhelmingly (4/5) focused on matters of form.  Writing ability, according to their rubrics, is a matter of being able to make a 'thing' with a particular shape.  Syntax, vocabulary, format / surface grammar, paragraph and text cohesion--and then, oh yeah, I almost forgot: 'creative original ideas.'   If the SAT wants focus on form, education will focus on form.  And it isn't like they just woke up with a bad idea and imposed it; the formalist preoccupation is meme-etic, everywhere.  But writing enacts, whether we're conscious of it or not.  Essays enact a power relationship (I dominate by my 'logos / pathos / ethos; I get my opponent to agree.  I win.)  They're agonistic.  Competitive.  Apparently Athabaskans don't like this at all.  Neither do a lot of Minnesotans. 

But politics aside, a pedagogy focused on how to 'do things with words' goes a lot better.  A 'pragmatics' not a mere syntax.  A theory of actions, not language objects (there Maria, I told you I'd dump a lot of linguistic theory in).  What are you DOING in saying this?  I think blogs work (fewer cliches, fewer ossified forms, less of that parody we saw last week:  'Opening sentence with some metaphor that you idiot teachers will like because it makes me look smart when in reality I found it on Spark-notes.') because (1) real classmates will see them, and (2) they are--or can be--a real communication to a real audience. 

So yes, faking 'Every Essay I Have Ever Written' is also a 'performance,' but it performs making / faking a formal object for a teacher.  It performs 'school.'  We need to re-form 'school.'  So it won't be as grimly Dickensian as reform school.

--(School) Essays have auras.  The 'school essay' is not what we think of as an essay; it's like fire drills or assembly or  uniforms or any other coerced behavior with no connection to anything in students' lives beyond 'doing school.'  This is why the Manoa Writing Project folks found that students will almost always try something that worked before rather than risk something new.  And--'Bueller? Bueller?  Anyone?'--what 'worked before' was faking an essay.  Look HERE for Manoa's nice 2-page guide to thinking about writing assignments.  Think about ways to strip off that ugly aura.

"One Town's War on Gay Teens" Lesson

My students read "One Town's War on Gay Teens" for class today. I had a pit in my stomach all day; I was worried about the things they would say or worse- that they might not have anything to say. To help my anxiety, I carefully crafted a lesson plan based on our discussion last week and Shor’s chapter “Three Roads to Critical Thought.” Shor says: “the process of individual writing followed by small-group discussion leading to whole-class dialogue insures that everyone spends time on the tasks—writing, reading to peers, debating the issue, and preparing to report” (p. 71). He talks about how starting the class with student participation via writing and/or group work allows students to co-develop the lesson. This is particularly important, Shor tells us, when the teacher introduces a topic theme. With this in mind, I planned the following:

Building on our discussion of thesis writing and organizational schemas, I had students spend the first 10 minutes of class composing a brief outline for the following prompt: Do you think the author’s argument was persuasive? I decided on this question because I wanted to focus our discussion around the use of narrative in constructing a persuasive argument instead of a moral or political discussion around GLBT rights. In retrospect, I think this was not the best choice for a prompt. Next, per Robin’s suggestion, I planned for students to go to one side of the room if the thought she was persuasive, and the other if they though she was not persuasive. I planned to pair them up with someone with an opposing perspective so they could discuss their opinions. Finally, I prepared a list of discussion questions and passages I wanted to discuss as a group.

Good thing this was a lesson plan. This is what really happened:

As they wrote their outlines, I got excited. They were looking through their articles for examples and writing vigorously. Then I asked them to stand up and move according to their opinion of the article. Everyone walked to the same side of the room. They all thought the article was persuasive. And I panicked. As I thought through my next move (I was thinking they could still get in groups and discuss), a student said: “What was she persuading us to believe?” At that moment, I realized that there was not a clear call to action or conclusion, and so my students all found something different in the article. I told that student he had asked an excellent question, and then posed the question to the class. This led us in a discussion that took up the entire class period. I didn’t get to any of my pre-planned questions, and instead I followed their lead. They were really interested in the author’s motivation, the relationship between politics and culture, audience and venue, and the overall impact of the article. What I found most interesting about the discussion was that they felt empowered to do their own critique of the article. They talked about aspects of the article that they liked and disliked. My students especially took issue with the lack of a clear call for action to suspend the Neutrality Policy. They were concerned that there weren’t resources for readers that may be considering suicide or who were triggered by the article. And they wanted to know how they could get involved. I told them repeatedly how impressed I was with their commentary and their ability to critique. It was an exciting moment where I felt that they were learning from each other and constructing a complex and varied critique. Generally I just prodded them along by asking questions about what they had said, although I find it hard to get away from the student-teacher-student model where I affirm their comment before someone else volunteers to speak. Overall, it was a good day, and the most excited I've been about teaching in a while.

Anil's post

Hello,

For my post this week, I have decided to weigh in on an ethos I perceive to be developing in the class, one that has, quite frankly, left a bad taste in my mouth. While recognizing that the confidentiality we share is not ensured under HIPPA, I do hope that things I write here can stay among us. (The public nature of the blog, of course, stifles this hope….)

Anyway, I begin, briefly, with my experience as a teaching assistant last semester. Leaving aside the *fact* that I was vastly overworked and underpaid – such material conditions, of course, affect my own attitude toward pedagogy as well as the quality of my instruction – I wish to focus on the performance of students as indicated by their grades. Each TA for this class had to grade about 70 papers (3 sets…) according to a fixed rubric. For my first set, slightly over half failed the assignment. Such a staggering number indicates, in my view, only one thing: a failure on the part of the instructor to adequately convey the information or teach the skills necessary to fulfill the most basic assignment requirements. In a situation like this – or structurally comparably ones, where statements can be made about the majority of students – it strikes me as irresponsible and unfair to shift culpability to the students, blaming their purported lack of intelligence, or absence of prior adequate training, or whatever. Indeed, after having spoken with a countless number (again, we we overworked, a point I cannot resist belaboring and following with an ellipsis…) of these students, I can say that most were pretty good – and some were really, really intelligent, certainly much more than I (a mere ‘v’ away from an anvil) at that age. I won’t break the blog’s cardinal rule by boring you all with the details of what precisely went wrong so as to result in this unacceptable number of failing grades. But I hope my point is clear. Cast in slightly different terms, here’s what I’m getting at: Any sort of critical pedagogy worthy of the appellation would seem to be premised on respecting one’s students as capable interlocutors.

Again, this was not meant to be some sort of diaphanously veiled critique but rather an expression of some concerns coming from someone who would someday like to be a good teacher.

Rolling Stone Article: "One Town's War on Gay Teens"

Here are the links to the Rolling Stone article about the Anoka-Hennepin gay teen tragedies:

"One Town's War on Gay Teens" in Rolling Stone


"Anoka-Hennepin School District Fights Back Against Anti-Gay Bullying Claims Made In Rolling Stone Article" in the Huffington Post


"Anoka schools fire back over gay bullying story" in Pioneer Press



As they say, the end is the beginning is the end.

Rhetoric and the Politics of Design

I elected to share an assignment I often use with my first-year writing courses: "Rhetoric and the Politics of Design." This generally is a mid-semester assignment in my course schedule. I ask my students to think critically about their surroundings. I emphasize that they should think critically about things they do not normally consider (e.g. bus stops, classrooms, pens, manuscript layout, etc). Initially, many of my students find this practice quite difficult.

Once we reach a point where my students are starting to get it, we talk about how rhetoric (and design) is often called into existence by an exigency, or rhetorical situation (see Bitzer's "The Rhetorical Situation"), and we start trying to think of the exigencies that call tangible things into existence (e.g. chairs, desks, cups, watches, etc). Then, we read Jennie Winhall's "Is Design Political?"and follow that reading with a viewing of Gary Hustwit's documentary about objects and designers: Objectified. 

After we've read Winhall's piece and watched Hustwit's documentary, we ruminate (marinate?) on the ideas floating around. We then do a Derridean deconstruction (though, I don't call it that because I don't  introduce them to Derrida) of objects that each student picked. We think about how objects and the rhetoric used to create them are political, and we deconstruct objects in order to see if we can ferret out the political of the designed.

I tend not to be super prescriptive in my assignments, and I like to let them flow organically for each class. Every class is different, so I try to keep that in mind when we work on things.

So, it ends--for now.

Learning to speak film language.

Koel and I plan to teach an intro to film class next year with a focus on melodrama (coughrobincough).

However, before we can actually dive into film studies (and LINDA WILLIAMS!!!), we have to teach students illiterate in film language to use their camera stylo (a la Astruc). My plan of action comes from my first experience in film production: I will have them actually make a rudimentary film.  First, I will teach film grammar terminology (wide shot, close up, medium shot etc.). Then, I will break the students into groups of four (this is subject to change). They will have to put together a narrative (cause and effect relations in time) using 20 frames of film language and present it to the class.

That's all for now folks, but I will probably rant about this in class.

The End.

Rapping with Quintilian

The assignment reminder I'm posting below this paragraph followed, of course, oral instruction in class regarding the parameters of the assignment. I generally offer this as and "extra credit" assignment, meaning the students cannot lose points for not doing well, but they have an opportunity to vastly improve their grades if they take it seriously. The assignment followed from a conference (Natl Comm Assoc) paper I presented on the usefulness of Quintilian's master text on teaching for today's students, particularly those starting at a disadvantage (such as many of my College of Southern Nevada students). In the paper, I made the argument that we could basically rehabilitate at-risk students by teaching them everything they needed to know to be competent writers and speakers in two semesters--using, of course, Quintilian's lifetime, step-by-step methods. Among his many suggestions is that we teach through imitation; he particularly notes the importance of reaching out to growing minds by accessing material that was considered quite controversial in the time (comics, actors, torrid tales, for example) but that would be engaging for them. He suggests such material as a constructive way to study words and arguments and styles that are effective and moral and those that are not. So, my hope was that be having students imitate a movie speech or rap that particularly resonates with them, they would learn to express themselves better when using their own words (see the assignment below). This is one of those assignments that has extreme results. It has quite seriously "saved" students that were on the verge of failing, giving them inspiration and self-confidence; it has also utterly failed for others, who miss the point of "imitation" entirely and instead stay locked in their self-limiting idea of who they are or should be. One student once even gave a completely dismal, depressingly flat reading from the Gospels. Sigh. At least if she'd done Charlton Heston as Moses we could have worked with it. Anyway, although the assignment was designed for first generation students at a struggling community college, I have found it quite helpful for reaching out to "troubled" kids here at Minnesota as well.

Here's the assignment as I sent it out after Spring Break 2011:

Welcome back!!

Ready to give your movie/rap speech tomorrow? :-)

I can't wait to hear them!!

Reminders about what it should be:

GOAL--Delivery, delivery, delivery!!! Being able to express emotion while speaking is an important skill to practice. By imitating a famous dramatization, you will gain the experience of expressing heightened emotion in front of a group while maintaining some safe "distance" from self because the words and style are not your own. Learning what it FEELS like to be expressive in front of an audience is a big step toward enacting expression in your own speeches.

SPECS--

The speech should be between 1 to 3 minutes, and it should be intense (that could mean passionate, funny, angry, revolutionary--anything that is exciting!).

I recommend movies/raps because they naturally tap emotions. Go to americanrhetoric.com for some famous movie speeches and accompanying script, or find another reputable outlet for what you'll perform. (If you want to transcribe it yourself, that's fine, too.)

Poetry is also fine, so long as you perform it poetry-jam style. If you don't know what that means, I suggest sticking with the movie/rap.

Bring a print out of the speech--both for you to use as speaking notes and for me to collect when you are done. Be sure to put a citation on it so I can find the original source. You are of course welcome to memorize the speech, but that is NOT expected. What is expected is a DRAMATIC performance.

POST YOUR SPEECH--I will open a space for you to post your movie/rap speech selection. First come, first served!! And I am not going to police the list--you must look through it yourself to be sure your choice isn't already taken. If you do give the same speech as another student, whoever posted their speech first gets the extra-credit points and the other student gets no points.

Enjoy!! See you tomorrow!!!

--Shannon