Rethinking In-Class Essay Discussion
by Samantha
Reid
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| As "neutral"
as I try to make my paper assignments and my questions when I lead
class discussion, I nevertheless unwittingly give clues to my students
about what I would like them to say and about how I would like them
say it. |
One of the biggest challenges for me during my first
semester of teaching Expository Writing was negotiating the space
between directly instructing my students on the ways to approach (and
ultimately write about) our texts, and leaving them to find their
own interpretive paths independently. On one hand, I believe that
my students need clear direction as they enter into an academic environment
that is, to varying degrees, foreign to them. Not only have most of
these students never written an analytical, text-based essay, they
have never read one, and are thus unfamiliar with what David Bartholomae
calls the "specialized discourse" of the University. Yet,
on the other hand, I realize that as I lead class discussion toward
these academic "commonplaces," I unintentionally communicate
my own interpretive biases towards the literature we read and thus
limit the responses that I might otherwise receive from my students
in their essays. As "neutral" as I try to make my paper
assignments and my questions when I lead class discussion, I nevertheless
unwittingly give clues to my students about what I would like them
to say and about how I would like them say it.
Not surprisingly, the most difficult day of my two-week sequence of
class activity is the day in which we discuss a new text. On these
days, the students have read the assigned reading and are asked to
come to class ready to ask questions and discuss issues in the texts
that they find important. In the beginning of the semester, after
the class had read Peter Drucker?s "The Age of Social Transformation,"
I asked the class to break into small groups of three or four and
to discuss their homework questions together. Then, I handed out lists
of six questions that I had written about the text, questions that
I believed would not only instigate useful and interesting responses
to the literature, but which would serve as examples of what "productive"
academic questions look like. I assigned each group to one question,
and asked them to work on the answer together, and then to choose
a member of the group to present their findings to the class. While
the class discussion that followed seemed initially to be a "success"
students talked much more than during our previous class discussion,
and a lot of "important" ground seemed to be covered and
understood.
I later regretted my tactic when I received drafts of their papers.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the papers tended to center around the topics
and quotations that I included in my questions. For example, one of
the questions I asked was:
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How does Drucker describe rural vs.
urban life? How do these types of societies correlate, for Drucker,
to standards of living and/or the "progress" associated
with his "knowledge society"? How might his argument be
complicated by the emergence of biotechnology in "the countryside"?
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| "It seemed
as if the central problem was not that the students did not have the
"knowledge" necessary to write within this discourse, but
that they had trouble transferring that knowledge from the classroom
discussion to their private writing experience." |
Although the paper assignment was fairly open-ended,
asking students to consider Drucker's claims in light of Pollan's
essay, almost half of the class focused on this issue in their paper
(I think students concentrated on this question more than the others
because it was considered the "easiest" of the six).
While I was troubled by thoughts that I had limited the possible approaches
to the paper topic, my greatest concern surrounded not the topics
of their essays but the content. Although many of the students seemed
to have gleaned from my questions what they believed I thought was
an "appropriate" or "correct" approach to the
texts, they did not have the ability to support their project with
textual evidence or even to develop the topic into a meaningful project.
A few papers compared and contrasted rural and urban life without
really applying these connections to the greater issues at stake,
such as biotechnology and "the knowledge society." Furthermore,
some students didn't really seem to understand my question even as
they used it to frame their work, misusing, for example, the word
"correlate" throughout their papers.
What I found particularly perplexing about this situation was that
students had actually discussed possible answers to these questions
in class, some of which were quite sophisticated and could have been
developed into excellent papers. It seemed as if the central problem
was not that the students did not have the "knowledge" necessary
to write within this discourse, but that they had trouble transferring
that knowledge from the classroom discussion to their private writing
experience. I decided that in order to make class discussion useful
to students in the process of writing their papers, I would need to
find a way not only to help them to "extend themselves,"
to use Bartholomae's term, into academic discourse, but also to help
them to transfer the useful and interesting ideas they were generating
in class to their own writing.
To this end, I decided that instead of using my own questions, questions
that both in style and content are foreign and seem to them to come
from a place of authority, I would let them come up with their own
questions, thus allowing them to use their own vocabulary, both in
terms of their language and their interests. After the class had read
Abu-Lughod?s "Honor and Shame," I had the students break
into small groups and come up with questions about the essay. My only
stipulation was that the questions be "productive," i.e.
could generate discussion and could be further investigated within
the texts. I then asked the groups to write their question on the
chalkboard. Once all of the questions were written, we would go through
the questions, letting those who did not pose the question answer
first, and allowing time afterwards for those who did write the question
to add anything else they had in mind. |
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"Although I had stated many times
that I was interested in their ideas rather than the authors' or
my own, emphasizing both student question and response in class
served as a vital cue to my students that I was in fact serious."
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The questions that the students posed turned out to
be really interesting and diverse. I was initially pleased merely
to be able to keep my "interpretive distance," as I stayed
relatively quiet, only pointing to questions on the chalkboard and
facilitating the discussion by calling on students with raised hands.
I was further delighted to see that their questions not only introduced
topics of which I probably would never have thought to bring up, but
that they were as academically "productive" as any question
I could have written. Some of the questions were a bit clumsy in their
wording, but even these questions proved useful to the class. For
example, one question read:
Dr. Lila questions if the Bedouin identity could be maintained after
schooling. Is she inferring that the Bedouin society is not a "knowledge
society"? Could Bedouin society become a "knowledge society"
and maintain its identity?
While the use of "Dr. Lila" instead of "Abu-Lughod"
and "inferring" instead of "implying" marks this
question as still not fully participating within the university discourse,
it sparked a discussion on the connections between Abu-Lughod's and
Drucker's texts that seemed to be more fully understood (and well-received)
than those generated by my own questions, as evidenced in class discussion
and, most importantly, in the papers that followed this discussion.
This set of papers was markedly better than the last: their projects
were generally more focused and they supported their projects with
interesting connections from the texts.
Students seemed to be more willing and able to transfer the ideas
initiated by this discussion to their own writing, for which I assign
two primary reasons. First, although I had stated many times that
I was interested in their ideas rather than the authors' or my own,
emphasizing both student question and response in class served as
a vital cue to my students that I was in fact serious. Perhaps because
of this, this time students took notes on what each other was saying
(or at least wrote down the questions that were written on the chalkboard).
Also, because the students wrote their own questions, they fully understood
them and were more invested in their answers. There was thus not a
great divide between the topics of their papers and the level of textual
support and overall structure of their projects. |
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| "As I
walked around the room as students composed their own questions, I
noticed that one student had pulled out my Drucker question sheet
and was using it as a model for her own question." |
Although my first experience with giving students my
own questions for discussion initially proved somewhat disastrous,
I now believe that it is something that I cannot leave out of the
semester completely. Without my initial questions, perhaps my students
would not have written such "productive" and interesting
questions themselves for our discussion of Abu-Lughod. Perhaps they
would not have even known what I meant by such a term without having
been given an example of one of the commonplaces of academic community.
Interestingly, as I walked around the room as students composed their
own questions, I noticed that one student had pulled out my Drucker
question sheet and was using it as a model for her own question. I
think that reading and answering my questions served as a necessary
step for students as they become acquainted with this new discourse.
Bartholomae argues that the "bluff" tactic characteristic
of the writing of those entering the University, while often producing
awkward and incoherent text, is also "a necessary and enabling
fiction," one that serves as an intermediate step between the
former and the new way of reading and writing about texts. I believe
I can achieve the balance I seek as a teacher, a balance between offering
guidance and allowing interpretive freedom, by first presenting my
own appropriation of this "specialized discourse" and then
pulling back and allowing my students to apply (or even alter) this
model towards the communication of their own ideas. |
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