I want to put my first blog post into conversation with my own experiences balancing discussion and “teaching.” In that post, I felt that there could be a place for narrative in my classroom, and I described a sort of hybrid classroom pedagogy where both Freire’s description of a teacher who “cognizes” and then “expounds” (5) and active student response and engagement had a place. I’m not sure I have really figured out how to make that work in practice, though. Freire’s dialogue-based approach appealed to me in the beginning, and in theory still appeals to me now. I still appreciate the idea that true knowledge “emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (Freire 1). Yet, in my own classroom, I have not really found dialogue to be useful except when analyzing the course readings. The dialogue-based approach presumes a willingness of the student to step beyond course materials and to engage with the world beyond. In my own classroom, I have found that the students are most willing to talk when they are trying to understand something more concrete: for instance, the contents of Helen Epstein’s article “AIDS, Inc.” There is something tangible there for them, something they can hold on to and harken back to when they begin to reach out. However, when the topic is “writing,” a vague and painful process for many of them, they are much less willing to chat.
When I hear the stories of some of my peers giving “lessons” on MLA or thesis development, I recoil. It is not that I think the students do not need a better understanding of the expectations for their writing. Instead, it’s that I have no experience being “taught” to write, and so can’t really envision what that experience looks like. Instead, I do for my students what my teachers did for me: show examples and offer tools. I’ve organized all of these “tools” in a file called Writing Resources on Blackboard (name ganked from Trina, thanks Trina!). Sometimes, my classes take on a sort of give-and-take atmosphere, where I showcase the tools, walk the students through them, and then they ask questions and try to make sense of my expectations. Other times, they are silent and seemingly mystified. At these times, trying to engage the students in dialogue rarely does anything: they do not see the process of writing as something they can or should have a say in.
I’ve been contemplating attempting to “teach,” though. I’ve tried to imagine how a class lesson might look where, for instance, I just told them all about thesis statements. Mainly, this is because I still see some of my students struggling with understanding how and why their own writing is not matching the course expectations. For instance, I spent a good part of one class a few weeks back trying to explain to my students why one example thesis we were looking at was not yet “original.” (This was in response to reviewing the Grading Criteria for their Midterm Responses). It was difficult. Responding to sources–that comes easily to most of them. Using those sources in an argument–easy to some of them. Moving beyond those sources to envision an original and compelling claim–easy for very, very few of them. And it wasn’t just the “doing,” but the imagining of it.
What I have found most useful, then, is to do all I can to help them imagine what such an essay might look like. Looking at examples helps, revisiting our sources does too. I’m still not satisfied that they are seeing how fluid the whole process can be, and how the way they write and what they focus on for one assignment might not necessarily work for the next. I’m still trying to figure out the most universal approach for this.