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Month: November 2009

The World Between the Lines

The World Between the Lines

Published by Iris on Friday, November 6th, 2009
All's Well That Ends Well - National Theatre
All's Well That Ends Well - National Theatre

A few friends and I have started a Shakespeare Project. We want to read Shakespeare’s plays, starting with the ones we’re least familiar with and moving up to the biggies we all remember from college, taking about two weeks to read each one. (This is kind of a repeat of a project my family undertook when I was in high school. We’d all read a play a week and then sit down on Sundays to watch the BBC versions of the plays. It was a project I mostly resented at the time, but now really want to do.) So every morning I get up, make hot chocolate while feeding the cat, and then spend half an hour or 45 minutes reading a few scenes of Shakespeare. When the cat finishes his breakfast, he jumps up to sit quietly with his front paws planted as near to the left-hand edge of my Complete Works of Shakespeare as possible so that I can run my fingers along his head and shoulders while I read and sip hot chocolate. Pretty idyllic.

Anyway, I was reading All’s Well That Ends Well, which I had just seen beautifully performed by the National Theatre about 10 days ago, and I suddenly realized that there had been whole little scenes of action in the production that simply don’t show up in the dialog on the page. The actors and directors had taken the time to wonder why some of those off-hand lines were there, and to build that world into their production. Left to my own devices, novice that I am, I’m incapable of seeing the world that exists between the lines of dialog on the page, but that world is so much richer and more fascinating than the pure dialog admits.

As I taught a couple classes of freshmen this week and tried to build a picture of college-level research for them, I wondered yet again how to bridge the gap between expert and novice. I see conversations where they see bits of data. I see interconnections between vocabulary and lines of arguement where they see result list after result list that doesn’t contain “sources on my topic” (by which they mean “sources that say what I’m about to argue”). How do I first describe the world between the lines for them, and then help them develop the capacity to imagine it for themselves?

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Turning Topics Into Searches

Published by Iris on Thursday, November 5th, 2009

The last couple of mornings I’ve spent time with a couple of different freshman writing seminars getting them ready to tackle the research component of their classes. Both times I tried a technique that I’d done once last year when I co-taught with a colleague of mine. It’s kind of like concept mapping… but with an eye toward building searches.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Talk about how writing a research paper is like participating in a conversation.
    When you enter a conversation at a party, you need to know a) who’s talking, b) what they’re talking about, and c) how they’re talking about it. Parroting back what people say is not a conversation. Actually contributing to the conversation means having a grasp of the topic and the vocabulary that is in use within that conversation. Relevant vocabulary is also important because search is basically vocabulary matching.
  2. Write a “topic” up on the board.
    This should not be a beautifully narrowed topic, both because that makes the exercise harder and because that’s not actually reaching students where they are. In both cases, for me, the students were at the “I want to do something about globalization and agriculture” stage. Yesterday I got a student volunteer to write his topic on the board. Today’s class was a little more structured and twice as long, so I picked a topic that I knew would serve as a robust enough foundation for all the components of the class.
  3. Invite students to come up and write the answers to two questions: “Who might have studied this topic?” and “What questions might they have asked of the topic?”
    So, for example, if the topic is “organic food” students might write “EPA,” or “Behavioral economists,” or “farmers,” or “doctors,” or “sociologists” (these are examples from this morning’s exercise). Some questions included “is organic food more nutritious than conventionally grown food?” and “what motivates people to buy organic food?”
  4. Talk as a group about what terms might crop up in the articles by the different groups, building searches as you go.
    Basically, that black board full of groups and questions serves as the basis for the rest of the class. Searching Google? Show how to limit to .gov sources to hit those EPA people. Searching Academic Search Premier? Talk about differences in disciplinary language and collect subject headings that match the topic at hand. Having trouble with students still typing “effect of pesticides on the production of corn” into search boxes? The blackboard helps you remind students to step outside of their own phrasing of the topic and choose meaningful terms that would have appeared in, for example, a report from the USDA. STILL having trouble? Do it again. And again. And little by little it sinks in.

An added benefit of this technique is that it gets the whole class up and moving near the beginning. I can’t tell you how much this changes the atmosphere of a morning class full of sceptical freshmen. I don’t know why it helps, but I’ll go with it.

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