The primary innovation that makes the expanding use of instructional technology in the classroom so exciting, for me, is that it empowers students to disseminate their own work. Such empowerment can have unintended consequences, and creates new challenges for us as teachers. One faculty member with whom I discussed blogging said “I don’t want my students analyzing Plato for each other; their understanding of Plato is shit.” Aside from the fact that the statement might have been true (if loathsome), it further illuminated for me the tension between writing as process and writing as product. Exploration of this tension is central to the WAC/WID way, but seeing it played out in a couple of the course blogs that I’ve launched this term has been illuminating.
In a first-year writing course, students were required to attend a reading and then to post their reactions on the blog. The first blog post was from a student who railed at length and in detail about how boring the reading was and how uncomfortable he felt at the venue. The post wasn’t nasty at all, but it was quite negative in tone.
Rather than taking the post personally or defending the assignment, the Professor praised the student on the blog for his honesty and, importantly, for his willingness to reflect upon his disengagement. She also devoted much of the next class session to a discussion of “what it means to be liberally educated,” and how we can find value in things even if our reaction to them is negative. She had been disappointed by the behavior of some of the students at the event, but she didn’t let this filter onto the blog, preserving that space as an area for students to work out their ideas and write without her hovering judgment. It would have been easy for her to chasten the student (whose post actually begat more complaining), but that could have negatively impacted the virtual space the remainder of the term. Instead, the faculty member modeled for her students an approach to studying the world that found value in what on the surface–complaining and rejection–held little at all.
All writing is both process and product, though some types of writing assignments necessarily emphasize one element over the other. What was successful about the teaching described above was its loyalty to the goal of the assignment within the context of the class. That faculty member who was concerned about his students’ grasp of Plato was seeing their writing exclusively as a product, and missing the extent to which informal, public, process-oriented writing can open areas for responsive teachers to intervene.
Thanks for this interesting post, Luke. I share this professor's apprehension (fear, to call a spade a spade) about leaving such complex and elusive material in the hands of the less-than-prepared. But on reflection I think it's clear that a genuine struggle with the material is the only way for one to understand it thoroughly. Plato can't be learned by rote. So, in this case, the "writing as process" approach not only produces better writing, but is directly instrumental to a deeper comprehension of the course material. I'd even go so far as to say that I'd rather have students arrive organically at a misguided interpretation of Plato than to be spoon-fed a correct one.
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