Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Self-Selection


For the most part, Janet Emig's "Writing as a Mode of Learning" didn't tell me anything I didn't know already.  Even so, there's a comfort in receiving information you already knew from an informed source, even if that source is thirty years old.  For my exploratory paper, I've been digging through sources from the '80s, so I'm becoming weirdly well informed about the concepts of writing and teaching writing that were around the decades before I was born.

The part that really interested me in the reading was something I've noticed in myself and in students I tutor; it's what I started thinking and writing about that eventually led me to my exploratory paper topic.  It's pretty obvious-sounding when put down on paper, but when Emig notes the "importance of engagement in, as well as self-selection of, a subject for the student learning to write and writing to learn" (126), I felt a little validated.

In the Writing Center on my old campus (and, to some extent, here), after reading through a particularly uninterested paper with a student, I used to ask whether the subject were self-selected or teacher-assigned.  Of those flat, lifeless, unengaged papers, not a single topic was self-selected.  As an undergraduate myself, I was never stirred to action by teacher-assigned writing prompts.  For essay exams, obviously I did what I could with what I had (but those are so often merely spitting out as much information as you can in the time allotted), but when it came time to write papers, I would ask my professor whether I could write according to my own topic that had interested me at some point during the reading or the class discussion.

Students in the Writing Center believe that they can bullshit papers; this may be true, but I've never seen a student who can successfully fake interest in a subject on paper without at least faking interest to him or herself during the researching and writing process.  If it was evident already in the composition world of the '70s that self-selection is so important in both learning to write and writing to learn, why is it not always an option for undergraduates to pursue some topic they themselves have identified?

2 comments:

  1. Interesting point about student responses when they select their own topic. I do think that instructors sometimes assign important topics, often times for specific reasons, but allowing more student choice probably does engage students more.

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  2. I agree that writing on a topic that you are actually engaged with produces better writing - I think that anyone who has had the experience of writing a paper on a topic she hated can attest to the "flat-ness" of the writing that results. At the same time, though, many teachers have assigned papers with five general topics to consider, and then the sixth option would always be an open topic. More often than not, I would use one of those proposed topics to start thinking (and eventually write) my paper. While I usually did not stick to the exact topic, it was certainly a springboard for me. So, even though I consider myself a student who generally does not like directive assignments, I enjoyed having certain topics proposed. Maybe I'm just weird. (And I realize that you are arguing for the open topic as an option in addition to the others, I just went off on a slight tangent :). )

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