By Andrea Lara-Garcia, Geography
Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024
Last semester, I had the privilege of teaching two discussion sections of GS10AC, or Introduction to Global Studies. Our first writing assignment was an analysis of the documentary film Writing with Fire. Set in Uttar Pradesh, India, the film follows a team of female journalists of the Dalit caste as they document injustices committed against marginalized groups and struggle to pivot to digital reportage. When I began grading the essays, I noted several broad areas in need of improvements across the students’ work, including organizational issues and lack of specificity. Most concerningly, I noticed a tendency towards generalizing about Indian society in ways that verged on racism. Though I left individual feedback on every student’s paper, I decided to address this issue in class for two reasons. First, I did not believe that most of my students who committed these errors were doing so out of malice, since their papers also contained other argumentation errors that suggested that my students were struggling to articulate themselves more generally. However, I also did not want to discount the potential influence of negative stereotypes on my students, and wanted to guide them through why such claims were unacceptable in analytic writing.
I decided the best way to approach this was through a collective feedback session. For each analytic flaw I wanted to address, I wrote a sample sentence or paragraph for my students to critique. For instance, the sample sentence for “generalizations” read: “The film shows that Indian society is much more regressive than western society.” Then, I had the students discuss amongst themselves what issues they saw with the writing sample and how they might improve them. After these brief informal discussions, they were then given the opportunity to share their critiques with the class. Students rightly pointed out the normative judgment embedded in a term like “regressive” and noted that the use of this word was not defined or contextualized by the author. I additionally shared that it was poor practice to compare a single country to an ill-defined region like “the west”; that the film was set in a specific place and was not intending to represent the entire country of India; and that comparative claims required substantiation through evidence. After this discussion, I demonstrated how I would edit the sample to make it more analytically sharp. The improved sentence read: “the film shows that in Uttar Pradesh, the caste system along with strict gender roles contribute to high levels of social inequality.”
Though this lesson took place early in the semester, I noted that it garnered the highest level of participation and discussion of any of my classes; it was so successful, in fact, that I repeated it again after another major writing assignment and continue to use it in my current class. Most importantly, subsequent student papers contained a much lower incidence of generalizing language, suggesting that my students became more aware of this tendency in their writing and were able to self-correct.