Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Pedagogy forum, Week 6
One thing that I have been pondering over the past week or so is how to get students to understand how to give the best construction criticism to help peers in a workshop environment. This question stems from obsevering student comments in our own poetry workshop and working with Amy Ellison in 1101 English. There have been a few days of workshopping sign inventories as well as outlines from future essays in 1101 and more often than not students are afraid to ask questions of a peer’s paper. I think that the most important thing to do as an instructor is to push the students to ask questions and then based upon those questions ask themselves if it can be answered with evidence from the text. In a creative writing workshop it seems sometimes that there is an extra layer of inhibition when the work examined is thought to be “personal.” How can the myth be overcome? The myth of “well you’re the writer and if that’s how you wrote it then by all means keep it that way,” seems so hard for students to overcome. What is the reluctance for students to let this myth go?
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Much of that can be solved by emphasizing the creative and collaborative elements of criticism. That is, when we meet to discuss Trista's poem in the workshop, we're only notionally talking about HER POEM and NEVER about HER. I encourage students to think of that time as devoted to making the people whose work is NOT under inspection (i.e., all but one) better critics. The idea is that, if we can encourage better criticism, make the class ABOUT criticism and less about your innermost secrets, then the students will take that criticism to the table for their next draft. If we help Trista with her poem, great; and we usually do, in some way. Still, it's not about her. She's sacrificing one day of collaboration in order to provide us with a sample text.
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