“To be blunt, I must be sure not to ‘teach’ these texts (in the common sense of the term), but rather to ‘have them around’ to wrestle with, to bounce off of, to talk about and talk from, to write about and write from. Again: not feel we must be polite or do them justice. In taking this approach I think we would be treating texts the way academics and writers treat them: using them rather than serving them” (74)
While I attempt to do this in my class, and I stress the importance of using the texts to create and support your own argument, I find most students still fall under the category of “serving them.” Their thesis statements just seem to be reiterations of the author’s claim, and no new thoughts are formed. If no new thoughts are formed regarding the matter, how can they actually enter the conversation the texts have created?
I think I have found a way to counter this dilemma in the classroom setting during peer review, by forcing them to think of their own papers as the text, since the majority of them are just summaries anyway, this works out. If their own papers become the text, then the classroom is the writing community, and their papers begin to form a conversation amongst themselves, and their peers become their audience. For essay two, some students agreed with Restak while others agreed with Samuel, and I put those people into pairs. The conversations the erupted from this disagreement led to some new generation of ideas that they hadn’t previously considered, and their papers drastically improved. They began to consider themselves as writers within their own community.