by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Rhetoric [A]sked to write an essay that deals with more than one primary text, [students’] tendency is ... to either illustrate the ways in which the texts make equivalent arguments, or to pit one text/author against the other… I realized that I needed to do more to teach students what it means to bring two texts “into conversation.”
by Kathryn Fleishman, English Challenged with independent critical thinking and absorbed in a network of ideas that reached out of our classroom and into their everyday lives, my students developed the willingness to risk an argument along with a strong grasp of the research process. … [S]tudents polished the opinions they had proffered as tweets and comments into solid theses for their individual research projects, transforming uncertain, visceral reactions into logical, distinctive arguments.
by Margot Szarke, French Many students feel challenged when asked to analyze a literary or cinematic work because there is a certain amount of intellectual freedom involved in the task... How can a text or film be successfully and meaningfully interpreted in multiple ways? How can references and textual details be used to effectively build up an argument?
by Lindsay Crawford, Philosophy By making students more conscious of the degree to which modes of presentation shape the seemingly neutral space of discussion, the students who tended to feel intimidated by more assertive students came to realize that many of the factors that encourage and shape their feelings of intimidation are irrelevant to the quality of the positions being evaluated.
by Kathryn Jasper, History I wanted the students to realize that historical interpretation, what appears on the pages of their textbook, was written by a human being who is not omniscient. The author’s conclusions are based on primary sources and informed analysis. In addition, that author is subject to his or her own biases. Moreover, the sources themselves are biased, which the students understood when they had to formulate arguments based on...[the] text.
by Sonya Lebsack, Legal Studies I have discovered, to my surprise, in the past few years, that most of my students—including those doing otherwise excellent work — struggle to read a chapter or article and state (in a paragraph or in person) what the author's “project” is and what the stakes of that project are...As a result, I focus my efforts on teaching this underserved area of focus.
by Leonard von Morzé , English Students taking my reading and composition class may be better at uncovering sources than I am. Adept at searching Google Scholar and other online databases of articles...my most resourceful student writers continually demonstrate the capacity to plug appropriate and erudite-sounding quotations into their research papers...It might be useful, I thought, to get them to resist some of the familiarity they believed they already had with the research paper.
by Benjamin Yost, Rhetoric Grappling with divergent understandings of a text is a highlight of the class, but for many students is also fraught with uncertainty and confusion...When they occur, I slow down the discussion, and remind students that different interpretations are not signs of hopeless undecidability, but reveal that arguments work only on the basis of particular assumptions.
by Mayumi Takada, English I noted a startling discrepancy between the intelligent insights students provided in class and in office hours and the poor critical papers they wrote...In the language of high school math, they simply wrote out answers without showing their work. They were incapable of doing a close reading, the building block of literary writing and analysis.
by Lael Gold, Comparative Literature Despite in-class instruction and a detailed handout on the subject of thesis and essay construction, the first batch of essays from students in my comparative literature course on literary depictions of woman warriors shared some fundamental shortcomings...I aimed at remedying [their] writing problems in a manner that would simultaneously deepen our engagement with the work presently under consideration, the fantastical Renaissance crusader epic Jerusalem Delivered.