Leaning into Writing Discomfort

In her book Designing Writing Assignments, Traci Gardner quotes a line I can’t get out of my head: “Students translate an instructor’s goals into processes they can handle.” The line comes from the Mānoa Writing Program’s study of almost 200 writing students, which further concludes that students use “strategies they devised to deal with earlier writing assignments, and they may try to use these strategies again rather than risk something new.”

I’ve seen this phenomenon plenty of times. Last year, one new project I gave students asked them to make a podcast on a social issue that comes up in A Raisin in the Sun. For the project, each student was to interview someone and then analyze the interview. So if, for example, I interview my dad about his experiences with race, I might compare his experiences to my own, hypothesize why he had certain experiences, or fit his experiences into a larger framework I’ve studied. I was expecting wonderful insights in the podcasts, but instead, I got lots of summaries and descriptions, with very little analysis. If you want to talk Bloom’s Taxonomy, the podcasts were at the very bottom level of thinking, simple reportage.

I was disappointed then, and I sketched up some new lesson plans to give students a clearer sense of what “analysis” means. But now, having the problem framed for me as students doing what they think they can do because they’ve done it before, I realize my task is more complicated than defining “analysis” for students and showing them good models.

Here’s another example of how a learner changes the assignment into something surmountable. My daughter, who is two years old, calls the playground, “peegound.” It’s not an obsession with toilet training that makes her say it this way; it’s that she hasn’t yet figured out how to pronounce Ls, long As, and Rs. She deals with the L and the R in playground by simply omitting them. And the long A sound, she converts to a long E. So what is my daughter doing? She’s translating the implicit assignment, “Say the word playground,” into something she knows she can handle, “Say peegound.” And her coping mechanisms, changing or omitting problem elements, are exactly the methods my students use.

So, how can I make my students see that, as Barack Obama and César Chávez before him put it, YES THEY CAN do analysis? How do I show them they don’t have to pretend the instruction, “analyze,” isn’t there or hope their well-integrated quotations will satisfy me? Giving mini-lessons defining analysis wasn’t sufficient, nor was stating my expectations in clear and precise language. What will I do differently when I assign the podcast this year?

Not only do I need to share more models of analysis, I have to devote more class time to letting students discover what makes the good ones good. I didn’t have student models last year because it was a brand new assignment, and even this year I don’t have many student models because last years’ weren’t all that good. I’ll have to look on NPR and other radio sites for segments that analyze.

(Incidentally, I’ve been looking at The Norton Sampler as a source of good essays. It’s meant for college student writers, but the way the analogy frames techniques might help, and there’s a good companion website with links to more essays. I always say that students don’t write good essays because essays aren’t part of their reading repertoire. Time to change that. And, if reading good analytical essays translates into writing better analytical essays, maybe it’ll also translate into writing better analytical podcasts.)

Also, the purpose and audience of the podcast needs to be clearer. Why should they take a risk on writing if their only goal is to please the teacher? Why should they try something hard that they might do badly if they can do something easier and more familiar and still get an OK grade? If they’re writing their podcasts for a more authentic reason—say, to prove to their parents how much (or how little) has changed between the early years of the Civil Rights Movement and the early years of the Obama presidency—perhaps they’ll have more incentive to analyze the problem. If they’re going to bother with higher levels of thinking like comparing, categorizing, and theorizing, they need to know who they’re trying to convince and why. Perhaps I can get the podcasts published on the school website. What other audiences might motivate them?