14 January 2014

Nails in the Coffin of the English Paper

Reports of the college essay's death have been greatly exaggerated.  If you're in doubt, just mention Rebecca Schuman's Slate essay, "The End of the College Essay," and sit back as faculty in a variety of disciplines and alums with wide-ranging college experiences weigh in on just how much writing matters.

But note: Schuman's widely excoriated essay deals specifically with the writing assigned in gen. ed. humanities courses.  I teach gen. ed. humanities courses.  Maybe that's why I didn't hate her essay as much as a lot of people did, and why I'm still thinking about it now that Schuman has moved on to other ways of annoying academics.  It's hard to find a good conversation, online or in person, about teaching practices in the analog gen. ed. humanities course--but that's a subject for another blog post.

No, college writing should live on, but there's a certain kind of ubiquitous paper assignment in the gen. ed. humanities that should be euthanized (particularly to the extent that "the humanities" get conflated with "literary study").  It constituted almost the whole of my own undergraduate learning (in an elite private institution of higher education), and it's the kind of paper assignment that I used to routinely assign in all of my classes, regardless of level or audience. The following description characterizes writing in a number of disciplines, but I'm going to call it The English Paper: anywhere from 3 to 15 pages, focused on one or more complex texts, involving an interpretive argument of some sort that draws evidence from a close reading of key passages.

Nothing wrong with that, right?

Here's the problem: The kids who can productively dig into this kind of essay generally already have a pretty good grasp of what it means to write well and how to make sense of a literary, philosophical, or historical document (and many of them are already majoring in subjects—polisci, history, english, etc.) that draw on those skills and demand sustained writing.  Those are only a fraction of the students in my gen ed classes, though. Many students (who will never take another course in the humanities) come to the class without the kinds of writing skills that have been honed on complex texts, and they are generally baffled by essay prompts that expect them to know already what that engagement looks like.

They can be taught to do it of course, and Schuman wrote a post on her blog explaining how the process works (short version: lots of preparation and pre-writing, individual work with the student, extensive feedback). An instructor with more freedom to devise prompts can go further by assigning papers in a sequence of increasing complexity to isolate and foreground the skills involved.  But the more effectively you teach students to write The English Paper, the less time and energy remains for the subject matter of the course.  The effort has a clear payoff for students in majors that will require more such writing--The English Paper involves engaging with texts and ideas in a fine-grained and argumentative way that will serve them well.  Students in other disciplines?  As Joseph Kugelmass puts it, "Sure, they [college essays] sharpen useful skills, but they apply those skills in unique, professionally useless ways." And those skills can come at the expense of other ways of engaging with the material that might stick with them longer.  

(Note also: teaching the The English Paper effectively is extremely labor intensive, and many people in a position to assign and assess The English Paper are not in a position to think deeply about best practices, much less put them into effect.  But that's the subject for another blog post.)

Thus the English Paper is gradually disappearing from one of the gen. ed. classes I routinely teach, a 200-level course on literature from roughly 1600 - 1800.  Periodization, globalization, and course titles are the subject for another post; suffice it to say, the course title adds "and culture" to "literature" and the course has a comparative/world-lit cross listing that belies its Eurocentric title.  In place of The English Paper I now give assignments like the following (bear in mind the actual prompts are much longer):
  • Read the editor's introductions to the two textbook anthologies assigned for the course.  Find one other source--online or print--about the period and cite it.  Draw from those three readings four main ideas about the literature of this period.  In what ways to Readings X and Y (the first two assigned for this course) exemplify those main ideas?  In what ways do they seem unrelated to those main ideas?
  • (After a class visit to the period collection at the U's art museum) Using the worksheet you filled out before, during, and after our tour, write 1 to 2 pages in which you do the following: (1) Describe how the paintings mesh (or not) with the assumptions you had beforehand about what "our period" looks like; and (2) Identify the single work that strikes you as most representative of the period as you understand it thus far (give reasons for your choice).
  • Go to the Rare Book Library OR find your way to [full-text facsimile database of books from our period].  Pick a text that interests you.  Say something interesting about how it connects to your learning for this course (plus a couple of other things too boring to describe in detail here that ensure that I will know if they're faking/plagiarizing).
I've also started giving a take-home midterm and final, each consisting of several short essay questions, as well as a question that requires them to grapple with a piece of text we haven't discussed in class. The questions have more specificity than the paper prompts above, and they have some echoes of the kind of work The English Paper requires.  I allow students to collaborate (though they have to submit the answers individually in their own words). For example:
According to the editor’s introduction to Basho’s Narrow Road through the Backcountry in your Bedford anthologies, “He is on a religious pilgrimage…for moments of consciousness in which he closely identifies with the scene at hand in what might be called “mystical identification” with the outside world, the flow of reality” (654). Select one haiku and surrounding text from the The Narrow Road that you particularly like and use it to explain what the Bedford editor presumably means by “moments of consciousness," ”’mystical identification,’” and “outside world, the flow of reality.” Offer some additional reflections on the example you chose. What do find particularly illuminating or meaningful about it.
We've talked about the differences in the depiction of God and religion in Pope’s Essay on Man and Voltaire’s Candide. Which of these two texts aligns more closely with the ideas Thomas Jefferson conveys in the excerpts from his religious writings in the Portable Enlightenment Reader (p. 160 – 166)?
These could easily prompt The English Paper, but the compressed and time-sensitive nature of the take-home exam focusses students' energy where it belongs: on the text. They're not channelling their received understanding about introductions and conclusions, and the fruitless search for What English Teachers Want--they're just trying to answer the question, and as a result the writing is invariably better than what I would get from asking for the same work in The English Paper.

I'd love to know how other instructors of humanities gen. eds. devise writing assignments that meet students where they are but push them to read more deeply, demand more intellectual rigor of themselves, and arrive at ideas that they are motivated to articulate carefully.

"I come to this conversation from a very specific place: as a tutor and advocate for dyslexic learners. I admit, despite my personal infatuation with essay writing, the idea of evaluating student progress through means other than the college essay makes my little dyslexia-advocate’s heart leap."

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