A Pedagogical Interlude
Hello,
from the bus between Boston and Portland, ME. This is my regular commute this
semester while on fellowship at Harvard’s Center for European Studies. The
commute is long, but I work well on busses and appreciate the time to write. I
will have to thank the Concord Coach Lines in my next acknowledgements.
I write
now with a brief reflection on the classroom. Though I’m far from the classroom
this year, it’s almost the time of the semester when I would be giving my pep talk
to students embarking on their first with writing assignment. The talk offers
suggestions to help them develop more nuanced (and frankly more interesting)
analyses of the material at hand. I’ve pared this down to ten minutes or less.
I never planned the talk to be a regular thing, but it’s proven to be quite
helpful in one format or another over the twenty years since I started working
with undergraduates’ writing as an undergraduate myself. It goes something like
this:
You were likely taught to write a
five-paragraph essay in high school, no? Let me guess, each of your three body
paragraphs undertakes a point or a text and each of those paragraphs relates to
an umbrella argument in your introductory paragraph. Now, chances are your
thesis looks something like a list, strung together with commas highlighting
what you’ll cover in these three body paragraphs. Am I right? This is a fine
starting point, but my task is to help you to improve your analysis in terms of
reading the material and understanding the context AND in written form.
Now, there’s some good analysis
here already. Look at your conclusion. You’re doing something really
interesting here. You’re starting to integrate your points. There are a few
comparisons going. Let’s go back to your paper and look for where you might
have flagged some of these points and developed the comparison further along
the way.
Where you’re at is to be expected.
My writing looks the same in an initial draft. Yes, really. I may no longer
write in five-paragraph essays, but articulating an argument takes time,
reflection, and several drafts!
Now your goal – and my goal for you
– is to learn to push your analysis further by thinking comparatively, not just
from one text or event to another, but between them. In terms of your paper
drafts, what you should start to see is more cross-over between your example
paragraphs as you think about connections – similarities and differences – and
change over time. Here’s what I recommend for possible starting points…
I hardly pretend
that the suggestions that follow are exhaustive or that they work miracles.
Nothing can replace individual conversations with the students as they work
through the material. Still, some starting points can help to make revisions
more approachable, especially for students who might not have had the time to
revise or who haven’t had practice drafting in the first place. They work well,
too, for the class as a whole as I guarantee students will recognize something
of their writing in the generalizations.
Some Starting Points:
Quicker Fixes:
1. Look
at that conclusion. Chances are it’s a better articulation of your argument
than your introduction. How about deleting it and pasting that at the top. No,
don’t worry that you’ve lost your “throughout history” opening sentence. You’re
drawing me into your actual themes / points of analysis far more quickly there.
No, I don’t need the inverted triangle introduction. Nope, don’t worry that
you’ve just deleted your conclusion either. You’ll have a better one that isn’t
just a restatement of your argument. Trust me, by the time you’ve put your
argument up top and paid attention to it along the way, you won’t need the
conclusion to provide summary. You’ll use it to extend your analysis further –
to some of those bigger “so whats.”
2. Make
your transitions work for you. There is a beauty to the bullet point or
numbered list. (Yes, I’m using that now.) But, talk me through the transitions
from one example paragraph to the next. Elaborate here. Chances are, the ways
in which you elaborate will start to get you to make comparisons and/or to
think about change over time. I really do urge them to avoid words like “also,”
“furthermore,” and “additionally.”
Brainstorming Exercises; or, a
potentially more lighthearted way of inviting comparative
analysis:
1. ID
Pairings. I’ve never been one to make miracles happen on a paper deadline of
tomorrow. I hardly expect you to do that either. Instead, let’s work on a few
exercises to let the comparative analyses flow. I like pairing ID terms. Rather
than have you summarize one term then the next, I’m going to give you two
together. You’ll tell me quickly what each refers to, but then you’ll spend the
bulk of your time thinking of what draws them together – or what contrasts
separate them – and why those similarities / differences are significant to the
history we’ve been studying. No, the connection won’t be obvious, like a
pairing of “Napoleon” and “Waterloo.” Rather, it might be something like “Waterloo”
and “Peterloo,” or “Napoleon” and “Joseph de Maistre.” No, I don’t want you to
try to read my mind. There is no singular right answer, there are a number of
ways to draw out the analytic story – it’s kinda like how we’ve been talking
about meaning and narrative in historical writing. You don’t need to write
everything down. In fact, I want you to reflect, choose a way of comparing them
and writing about that comparison. It’s OK to take time, here. …No, I haven’t
chosen this pairing at random. There are ready connections to draw from class
materials.
OK, no
student will really think anything is fun when on a quiz. But, embedded every
so often for practice in discussion, it can be genuinely entertaining – and
informative – for all. It can be competitive if done as a review game before a
final, too. And, it’s always useful to think about thematic similarities and
contrasts and change over time. While I use this to have students think with
the material in class, I use it as a tool in one-on-one conversations as well.
The language of the ID Pairing prompt can get the ball rolling when necessary.
Student A does not know what to write about for their paper, but tells me these
were the texts from a particular unit spoke to them. That’s as good a starting
point as any; it’s a natural place to be early in the writing process. They
have no clue how they’ll bring the texts together other than point out that they
belong to the same chronological period, geography, or broader thematic unit...
So, you have an interesting pair of
terms here, what
strikes you as some of the similarities and differences between them. Let’s brainstorm a few. … That’s a good
list. Without ignoring x, y, and z, it sounds like you’re really ready to think
about the story they can tell together about a. How about starting from there?
-- Caroline Shaw
