This is the ideal, and I’ve only ever had it once: I had a sophomore or junior level comp class with only about a dozen people in it that met twice a week for two full hours that I ran like a creative writing workshop. We did a series of linked essays: personal narrative, narrative based on an interview, research, and lyric essay about one topic related to something that had happened to the student, that someone else also experienced whom they could interview, and which they could research. One student wrote about her c-section, another a little sister with a rare form of cancer, another about joining the military and so on. It was bliss. We workshopped each paper. I may have divided the class into two sets of six so they didn’t have to read everyone’s paper. At the end, they put it all together into one paper in sections. They were pretty amazing. But it’s a lot of work with a full load with classes at capacity and 50 minute classes. That’s all to say peer review worked when I was a member of every peer group.
I’m thinking about how I might encourage students to take on subjects without immediately taking a side before they’ve done any research. Maybe I’ll trick them and have them make a list of six subjects they already have an opinion on and six they know exists but don’t have an opinion on. And them forbidding them from doing anything on the first six.
Right now they do a research question and preliminary research, an annotated bibliography, and an outline. And I still get two page papers. Maybe I’ll throw in something before before the research question, separate it out from the preliminary research. In the new first step of preliminary research, I think I might teach them to have a research folder where they keep all their printouts of whatever and a research folder in their computer or flash drive just for this paper. For the first assignment, I might have them go straight to that damned wikipedia page and give me a report on the basic situation so that they have enough info to understand more sophisticated sources. I think I’d like to teach them how to show them how I keep track of sources, how I have files of potential quotes copied and pasted IN QUOTATION MARKS, complete with ellipses and brackets AND CITATIONS. So that I never accidentally put something in a draft and forget that it’s not mine or where it came from.
If they have to take a topic they don’t know much about, then maybe they have to keep an open mind longer before taking their own position instead of starting with a knee-jerk position and only being interested in sources that reinforce that position.
#OccupyHE.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 