Re: Thinking, Teaching, Writing

The Curiosity Factor

My students' second blog assignment (to brainstorm and post a list of questions related to their topic) prompts many questions for me about the curious absence of curiosity in students raised in a culture of reality shows and endless deconstruction of the melodramas of other people's lives. Students have great difficulty posing questions. I'm just beginning to grasp the extent of that difficulty and how problematic it makes the invention stage (for personal, expository, or research-based writing).

Digression on sequencing in the composition class. It occurs to me that it may be easier to talk about the "curiosity factor" wrt research-based writing rather than personal writing, so that there may be some justification in flip-flopping the often-used ordering of assignments to end rather than start with the personal essay. The "successful" personal essay may demand a degree of self-questioning and self-reflection that is difficult for many beginning writers to muster. To what degree the personal essay is a necessary or desirable part of the FYC experience is, of course, a subject of debate (within my mind as well as the wider community).

Blogging (not slogging) through the research paper

Before the semester gets too far along (and I get overwhelmed with concerns that some students will never quite get the idea of writing in complete sentences), I'd like to record my hypotheses and goals. But first the approach...With the semester's focus on technology, students in my four FYC classes self-selected into one of eight group blogs set up by me:

• the laboratory (on issues such as robotics, AI, and nanotechnology)
• the hospital (on biotech issues such as cloning, stem-cell research, implications of the human genome project),
• the watercooler (on communications and entertainment tech, issues such as myspace, text messaging, videogaming),
• the studio (on the impact of technology on the creative arts),
• the garage (on transportation technology),
• the battlefield (technology of warfare, "pinpoint" bombing capabilities, embedded journalists),
• the marketplace (on the intersection of technology and economics, issues such as e-commerce, cashless society, effects of automation in the factory),
• and, of course, the classroom (the use of technology in education).

Ethnographic fieldworking: in practice

Results of my FieldWorking trial (three sections of freshman comp this past spring) were, not unexpectedly, somewhat mixed. On the plus side, students chose a variety of interesting subcultures and sites, resulting in increased student motivation, I think, and most certainly in livelier research papers. However, about 25% of them failed our department's portfolio assessment, a troublesome concern that demands some serious analysis.

Course overview. I structured the course as a series of short (one or two page) writing assignments, most of which could at least potentially be reworked into a culminating 8-10 page ethnography. We first spent some time talking about the idea of a subculture (a group of people with a shared system of beliefs, rituals, artifacts, and language who exist, at least part of the time, in a common space). What are the rituals and artifacts associated with (my ubiquitous example) the kindergarten class? Do the customers at Stop & Shop form a subculture? What stores do seem to have associated subcultures (a health food store, maybe, or Hot Topic)? Initial short assignments included writing about one's own subcultures and reflecting about experiences of being an insider/outsider. To introduce the process of taking field notes, I brought classes to the campus art gallery and instructed everyone to take notes; in later comparison we considered individual approaches, noting in particular the issue of subjective impression vs objective details (use of double-entry notetaking introduced here). Other short assignments included the following: a research proposal, place description, artifact analysis, comparison/contrast or classification related to subculture or field site, and an annotated bibliography. The final ethnography combined personal observation with background "traditional" research (approx. 4 text or Internet sources, generally to provide a broader context for specific field site chosen)

Ethnographic fieldworking: in theory

After several semesters of frustration with the dreaded freshman research paper (schizophrenia, death penalty, perils of cigarette smoking, and so forth), I decided to try out a new (to me) approach this spring, using Bonnie Stone Sunstein and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater's FieldWorking as primary text. In brief, the idea is to have students observe, research, and write about a subculture, defined by the authors as "an invisible web of behaviors, patterns, rules, and rituals of a group of people who have contact with one another and share common languages." The students must choose, then, a group of people who have a shared sense of identity, in some fashion, and who can be oberved to interact in some setting, termed the fieldsite.

At first I thought the approach seemed a little too narrow in a way, more suited to sociology or anthropology classes rather than composition. Then I started thinking about the subcultures to which members of my own family belonged: long-distance runners, community theater actors, assisted living facility residents, scrap metal dealers, emergency room staff, dancers and dance moms, gardeners, bingo players. I thought about Portuguese social clubs and fish markets and bakeries (and other such places with strong ethnic ties), people who work in cubicles, members of high school marching bands. There seemed to be rich possibilities for finally interesting research material.

Notes after reading research papers

Rough drafts of research papers came in last week, prompting my usual end-of-the-class mix of discouragement and energy. This time I was particularly struck by coherence problems in many of the papers, so I've been thinking about what sort of teaching methods might help develop those critical thinking skills that seem lacking. I do spend several classes talking about organizational issues with a longer paper, for a few minutes in the abstract, then walking through (on the blackboard) a couple of actual student topics: what sections (chunks) might we expect, what would be a logical ordering for these chunks, how would we move from one to the other. After first drafts are finished, I ask students to outline their own paper (or a classmate's), picking out the main sections and figuring out how they relate (summary, contrast, amplification by some sort of enumeration, narrative, description, expert testimony supporting point, and so forth). If there still seem to be coherence problems by the time I see a draft, I try to sketch an outline of the paper myself, suggesting which pieces seem to belong together, indicating where connections seem to be missing. I'm afraid that's not enough.

Sources for the research paper

The first place students look for information these days seems to be the last place most teachers trust: the Internet. Writing teachers and other more scholarly types would prefer students look for books in the library's online catalog or for peer-reviewed articles from research databases. That's what I tell students too. I try to convey to them just how amazing are the research databases they can access from their home computers; I tell them about the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, how in the old days we had to pray the library carried the periodical we wanted, and then that the issue we needed wasn't missing, that we had to take notes right there in the library carrel or spend a fortune for black-and-white xeroxes, or (worst of all) use the creaky microfilm machine to look at an article from the New York Times, taking notes on the slanted microfilm table in the semidark. They aren't impressed.