“If we believe that writing is social, shouldn’t the system of circulation – the paths that the writing takes – extend beyond and around the single path from student to teacher?”
-- Kathleen Blake Yancey
The problem with the traditional one-to-one tutorial model is not only its lack of sustainability in an age when the writing public is engaged with new technologies and the genres they’ve created, but that it runs counter to the idea that, since writing is social and takes myriad paths in its circulation, we should prepare our students to enter a writing public in the post-academic community. In truth, the one-dimensional student-teacher circuit is ill equipped for this.
For me, escaping the insularity of a single human relationship, my critique and the student’s response, has come through my embrace of a collaborative learning model. Displacing the teacher-student draft and revision process with a variety of workshop models that foster peer critique and encouragement, expands the possibility of teachable moments in a way that valorizes the idea of writing as a social activity.
As a teacher, I argue that the strict writer-teacher relationship intrinsic to traditional critical approaches to writing, as much as it can nourish effective writing, also runs the risk of discouraging students. What I’ve found is that the way I was taught to write; the head scratching encounter with organizing my ideas and getting them on paper; the returned essay with the teacher’s marginal remarks, “No transition,” “Analyze don’t summarize,” “Pronoun agreement”; and the red sea of criticism, simply validated my ineptitude. For many students the message is clear: they can’t write. What’s often missing in the one-to-one paradigm is an affective aspect that complements the analytical components of writing. Yes, rules, order, sequence, and structure are key to writing a meaningful essay, but the energy and spirit that makes a good paper is a matter of emotion as well as logic. Eliciting the students’ engagement with the feelings that swirl around the issues we ask them to engage with comes easiest when the forum is public, meaning the workshop-focused classroom. When the students feel it, they get it. And their capacity to feel arises out of the ebb and flow of consensus and dissensus that comes with collaborative discussion.
Inter-social activity inevitably has an emotional valence. I’ve found that the students’ confidence in knowing something, and writing about it, comes with their having a passion, an enthusiasm, for what they’re investigating. As such, I encourage an atmosphere of intellectual camaraderie that begins with an emphasis on our shared humanness. A self-critical understanding that they must first understand how they feel about something before they can theorize on why they feel as they do. This opens the way for investigating how language is an articulation of these feelings, and why one rhetorical approach is more effective than another.
As often as my students hear me talk about starting an essay with a compelling question as a thesis prompt toward their analyses, it is only at that point when they read a piece that begins with a straightforward rhetorical query (Would you assist your mother’s suicide if she were dying? What would you do if your sibling married someone of the same sex? Would you fire your maid if she were an illegal immigrant?), or come up with a complicated question of their own (when a student recently posed the question of whether it’s fair that athletes at the University of Michigan be allowed to register first for classes, the students erupted in response to the gravity of her question), that they understand what I’m trying to convey.
This emotional component of writing, however, doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires an emphasis on shifting the responsibility for unpacking the ideas we discuss onto the students. Having a workshop based class facilitates this. The idea of ceding intellectual control to the students may seem threatening to some, but the benefits in doing so far outweigh the risks. The idea that having the students counsel each other is like the “blind leading the blinding” can be mitigated by the workshop guide I provide, as well as our discussions about recurring patterns of mistakes and how to address them. It is inevitable that students will use the passive voice, err in agreement, and cite the dictionary rather than defining their terms through logic and example. But discussions in the workshop setting, that space where students learn through a collaborative dialogue with their peers, concretize those lessons in ways that my appeals to theoretical principles and their practical applications could never provide.
As a teacher, a central goal of mine is to encourage the generation of ideas. When I first came to graduate study, a highly esteemed professor admonished us (His course assistants) to never let the students in on what we were thinking. But as I began to teach, I realized that discouraging intellectual risk in my students, and eschewing pedagogical improvisation on my own part, made for a dull and uninspiring class period. My best teachers inspired me to take chances and embrace freethinking, and that is what I aspire to in the classroom. I encourage my students to air their thoughts, no matter how outlandish they may be, and am unabashed about sharing what I know and what I don’t know. For better or for worse, transparency is at the heart of my teaching method. In aiming to demythologize both the text and myself, my goal is to have the students be true to their convictions, but always with the caveat that they know why they believe as they do. My task is to have the students think for themselves, see their peers’ thought processes, and to collaborate with each other in understanding the variety of ways that ideas evolve.
Over the course of the semester I try to stay focused on a few key themes, and workshops have proven ideal to convey this emphasis. Grammar, and its myriad applications, is always under discussion. A second concern is the relationship between a topic and the ideas it might generate. Early in the semester we attend to what constitutes a constructive idea for a paper. Is a particular issue significant enough to merit a five to seven page essay? If not, might that topic give way to other, more specific and compelling, ideas worthy of scholarly consideration. This usually dovetails into a discussion on strategies for expanding on an idea: we might brainstorm a topic toward the absurd, for example, and then pull back and compare our limit with the subject at hand; or, as a way of better understanding a general concept, create a group of sub-headings that tease out the discrete components of an idea; or examine how a new idea can be formulated within our own questions and findings, which, when effective, can be as convincing, or more so, than the research and investigations that provide the source of our queries.
A question that never leaves me is this: am I really able to teach the students how to write? Certainly I can provide the rules, mechanics, and such, but teach them how to write? Who knows? What I can impart to them are ways to look at writing outside of their comfort zone, and offer ways to pose questions that pique their own curiosity as well as the interest of others. I can also inspire them by example, through my own passion for knowledge, and by ceaselessly encouraging their efforts. Perhaps I can’t teach them how to write, but in having them understand the distinction between critical thought and idle speculation, and fostering their progress in improving on how they articulate an idea, my hope is that they will use these skills above and beyond our time together.
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