Working in the writing center has given us all a great look into the minds of new writers. So far each student who has scheduled an appointment with me has had a new issue or s/he was at a different point in the process than my other tutees. Each session I'm addressing new questions and attempting to help students out of new predicaments. In the future though, I think I will be greatly helped with using some of the questions and ways to think that are featured in chapter 3.
The Four Questions (Conjecture, Definition, Quality, Policy) feel incredibly useful to my current tutoring sessions and for my future classes. Although students' issues with their papers are varied, I think I can begin to create some logical categories and subsets of their missteps: unaware of the audience, unsure of the terms they use, ignoring the importance of their topic, &c. These Four Questions could begin to prepare students in a useful way to think about writing papers. And while not all of their academic writing will benefit from these Questions, I think a majority of it will.
The Questions, if asked early in the writing process, can help the student clarify the argument and create a needed consistency. I haven't applied the Four Q's to my tutees because I'm discovering them only now, but a somewhat related tip I give to my tutees is that they should pull out certain parts of their papers, set them aside while they write, and continually refer to them. For example, when a student has a thesis statement s/he is okay with (I don't get a lot of enthusiasm on this often) I tell them to write that down separately on another sheet of paper and continue to write. By setting it aside, I hope the student will refer back to it while writing and remember what it is that s/he is actually arguing.
Although this strategy seems to work well in my 1:1 sessions, I was/am/will be wondering how can I teach these methods to a whole class. I fear that these rhetorical techniques and other nitty-gritty pieces of writing (grammar, usage, &c.) will get packaged as "neat, helpful tools for you--the student--to look over and apply at your leisure." Students might dismiss the importance of these techniques if advertised in this way. So, how do we teach the Four Questions, Kairos, &c. to a whole class?
Like Devin, I've been finding it easier to think of these tips in terms of tutoring rather than teaching. I remember ill-advised attempts on the part of some of my undergraduate professors to give one-size-fits-all writing tips to an entire class, which just frustrated the entire process of writing for most of us. Perhaps sharing the class more often with the PhD candidates, who are possibly already working in some of the more helpful-sounding bits of advice, would give us more practical rather than theoretical ways of incorporating what we're learning, or else maybe real-life examples of ways established teachers have used this as the guiding force behind classroom instruction.
ReplyDeleteI also think that tutoring is an interesting venue for a consideration of how the Four Questions can be useful for immature writers. In a tutoring session one works with a particular student on a particular assignment, so identifying gaps in the writing is much easier. Asking pointed questions to get the student to recognize the gap and develop a solution for it seems like an effective and efficient method. It doesn't seem like one could apply the questions in the same way in a classroom. An instructor would have to introduce the questions broadly as a way of developing an essay, rather than using them in remediation.
ReplyDelete