Personal Provocations and the Research Project

by Nicholas Hayes

At my nephew’s daycare, they do not have toys or games. They have provocations. What are provocations? They are toys or games, but with the important difference that the encounter with a provocation is seen as a learning opportunity. The children are not instructed or corrected on the appropriate way to experience the provocation. They are merely encouraged to experience and learn from it. At eighteen months, my nephew was mirroring a process that is effective at many stages of intellectual life: the personal encounter (I can hit the table with a crayon) that leads to reflection (I can use a crayon as a percussive instrument) and then to further research (Can I use two crayons simultaneously as percussive instruments?) The provocation leads to experience and then to further research. I find myself following a similar path in my research projects.

A few years ago, Miller Lite ran a series of commercials aimed at shaming men who did not conform to heteronormative masculinity. These commercials gleeful shamed men in scarves or holding satchels since these acts were portrayed as feminine. The misogynistic and homophobic content provoked me. More than that it stuck in my craw. That near constant irritation led me to research the way masculinity has been depicted in beer commercials. By the end of the research and writing process, I had a paper which I presented at the 2012 Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Conference. The provocation to annoyance had become a research project.

I have found that most of my research is provoked by the personal. This influences how I guide my students in their projects. I tell my students they should research what interests them or what impacts them in their day-to-day lives. But just as often, I advise them to figure out what is bothering them. I ask them what is stuck in their craws. The suggestion to turn their minds to small issues provokes projects that are often quite rich.

The approach can challenge the assumptions students have about research. It can challenge the drive for overly large topics students feel they need to fill pages. But the small question located in their personal lives has tremendous value. Emily Schnee at Kingsborough Community College – CUNY directs her students in a different yet still personal trajectory. She starts by having students write educational memoirs, which are then used as prompts for deeper research. She finds, “Having the opportunity to write and revise their lived experiences, within the collective of their peers, enabled the participants to understand how social structures operate, to discover the power of their own agency, and to critique their world.” Reflection on personal experiences is powerful, but the promise of research is connecting student experience to larger academic and non-academic worlds.

To make these connections, students must not navel gaze. Instead students must explore how small provocations connect to the world. Of course, some of this needs to come from the self. The tensile tethers that are thrown out and snag on credible academic research when drawn taut can lead to meaningful learning.

This is not an easy task. Throwing out tethers can create something beautiful and web-like when they snag on the solid research. But there are those moments when students fix them to insecure or unfounded pieces of research (like a random but seemingly golden Wikiquote that deprived of accurate context becomes mere pyrite.) The work can be difficult. The beauty we can be achieve at the end is based on exploration.

These paths are typical of those learned in the writing process—gathering, evaluating, and editing content. The writing instructor can best be a guide on the quest, and a friendly, reassuring voice when the paths and treasures a student finds are false. But we also know that every experience is a treasure. Everything connects to the larger world, but we must push ourselves to see how.

Work Cited

Schnee, Emily. “Writing the Personal as Research.” Narrative Inquiry 19.1 (2009): 35-51. Web. 18 Feb. 2016.

Writing Boot Camp Tomorrow!

Please remind your students to join us in Naperville, this Saturday, February 27th, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. for a faculty-led Incomplete Boot Camp to get their assignments completed! Sessions are designed for undergraduate or graduate SNL students who currently have an incomplete grade on their transcript or a current project they wish to complete.

Click on the image below for more details and dates for additional upcoming Boot Camps. Students may register for any session(s) by emailing SNLevents@depaul.edu; walk-ins are also welcome!

Overcoming Feedback Anxiety

by Steffanie Triller Fry

I still get feedback anxiety. It’s a very specific kind of writer’s block that inspires a very specific kind of procrastination. It happens when there’s a stack of papers on my desk; or, more often these days, a pile of files in the D2L Dropbox. With those papers sitting there, waiting for my comments, all other tasks in my day become more appealing. Responding to emails becomes as attractive as a bubble bath. Going to a two-and-a-half hour meeting? A piece of double-chocolate cake. Vacuuming all my floors? A romantic dinner in a nice restaurant.

            It takes me about twenty minutes to read and provide feedback on a five page draft. If the time commitment doesn’t exhaust me, the gravity of my task does: What will greet me when I open those documents? What can I possibly say to these students that will make a difference? And how many comma splices can I stand right now?

            With this mindset, it’s no wonder that Nancy Sommers called most of the teacher feedback in one of her case studies “mean-spirited,” and Peter Elbow argued that writing instructors should follow the physician’s oath to “do no harm.”

            At the same time, Elbow says there is no right or wrong when it comes to feedback. Rather, Elbow and Sommers both advise that the best feedback allows students to accomplish what David J. Nicol and Debra MacFarlane-Dick call “self-regulation,” or the ability to become reflective about their writing and take their learning into their own hands.

            I’ve taught with another instructor who “sets the mood” for giving feedback on student work. She gets her favorite pen, arranges her workspace just-so, lights candles, and mentally prepares herself to accept the written work in front of her.

            A strong process, I think. But I needed something more specific, more concrete than a state of mind. I needed a method to respond to first drafts that I could fall back on. I also needed a way to avoid over-efforting, or trying to be the “good student” myself and pointing out every single gaff in form, content, or language that I could find (see “Voluminous Written Feedback and‘Over-Efforting’ Instructors,” SNL Writing News, March 31, 2015).

            I analyzed my own idiosyncratic methods of offering feedback, and isolated five types of comments that I wanted to offer on every paper: a Compliment, an Opportunity, a Comment, a Question, and an Edit. On a first draft, I limit myself to one of each, though I make an effort to choose the most relevant compliment, opportunity, comment, question, and edit that I can.

I still provide students with a brief letter at the top of their draft that gives my overall response to the essay and summarizes the five comments that I’ve made. Then, I have a note that I copy and paste into each student’s essay to tell them that I’ve made five comments, and this is what they should do with them:

In the paper below, I’ve given you five different comments: a Compliment (something you’re doing well and should do more often), an Opportunity (something you’re not doing that you might want to do), a Comment (something I notice as a reader of your essay), a Question (again, something that I wonder as a reader of your essay), and an Edit (the grammar “tic” that I notice happening most often in this paper). I’ve pointed these things out once, but you’ll want to look over your paper for additional opportunities, questions, and edits that you’ll want to address for draft two.

In the time that I have been using this process, I have never once heard a student complain that I did not offer enough comments on her paper, but I have received substantially revised drafts. Prompted not to use my feedback as a checklist, but rather, as a step toward self-regulation, students seem to take revision to heart, looking at their paper again and trying to identify additional Compliments, Opportunities, Comments, Questions, and Edits.

Works Cited

Elbow, Peter. "Options for responding to student writing." A sourcebook for responding to student writing (1999): 197-202.

Katie (Kathryn Wozniak).  “VoluminousWritten Feedback and ‘Over-Efforting’ Instructors.” SNL Writing News. School for New Learning at DePaul University. 31 Mar 2015. Web. 28 Jan 2016.

Nicol, David J., and Debra MacFarlane‐Dick. "Formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice." Studies in Higher Education 31.2 (2006): 199-218.

Sommers, Nancy. "Responding to student writing." College Composition and Communication (1982): 148-156.

Reading with a Purpose

"Is there a more common lament among college instructors than, 'Why won’t students just do the reading?'" John Warner wrestled with that question in an Inside Higher Ed blog last week aptly titled "When Students Won't Do the Reading." Discussing both different types of deadlines and student workflow, Warner comes to the conclusion that any assigned reading must then be used within the class—something must be done with the information in order to contextualize it with the larger assignment. He says:

Rather than attaching a grade via a quiz or response, I’m trying to model a world where we can only get to the destination if we make the necessary stops along the way. If you think about it, this is how most of us manage to complete our non-deadline work, by seeing these smaller acts as part of a larger whole and working incrementally as we can. Students have very little practice with this, mostly because we’ve never modeled it, instead choosing to move from hard deadline to hard deadline.

Charles MacArthur of U Delaware adds:

Another solution to encourage engaged reading is online discussion. I post questions about the reading in an online discussion and invite students to participate in that discussion in the week before class. I tell students that I expect them to participate online at least 2/3 of the weeks, so I just need to monitor that level of participation. I also jump into the discussion occasionally but not too much, to support good thinking and encourage different responses. It also makes our class discussions better and includes more students. I can refer to a student's comments, especially one who does not often volunteer in class.  

Note that one good angle for questions is about the value or meaning of the reading for students' own lives. How would you use this? How is it related to your experience? 

Click here to read John Warner's blog post and be sure to check out the comments for some interesting additional discussion.

"Procrastination-Proofing Students"

Understanding procrastination and helping students work through its larger themes is the focus of a recent Inside Higher Ed blog by Steven J. Corbett and Michelle LaFrance. They write:

It seems to us that the more we understand procrastination and think it through with our students, the more we can help them build lifelong habits that allow them to be successful in our writing classes. Indeed, antiprocrastination habits can also help students manage the many competing priorities in their busy schedules as well as help us all remember what’s really important in life.

In the blog, Corbett and LaFrance discuss different causes of procrastination, some potential benefits, how to help students think through their procrastination habits, and the enduring advantages of procrastination awareness.

Click here to read "Procrastination-Proofing Students" now. As the authors say, "We must not wait too long in starting to offer our students some of this potentially lifelong good advice."

Writing Center WQ 2016 hours begin Jan. 11!

The University Center for Writing-based Learning (UCWbL) will open its Writing Centers at both the Loop and Lincoln Park campuses beginning Monday, January 11, 2016. Hours for both campuses are below.

Loop Campus Writing Center

(312) 362-6726

25 E. Jackson

Lewis Center 1600

Chicago, IL 60604

Monday: 9am-7pm

Tuesday: 9am-7pm

Wednesday: 9am-7pm

Thursday: 9am-7pm

Friday: 12pm-5pm

Saturday: 12pm-5pm

Sunday: Closed

Lincoln Park Campus Writing Center

(773) 325-4272

2320 N. Kenmore

SAC 212

Chicago, IL 60614

Monday: 9am-7pm

Tuesday: 9am-7pm

Wednesday: 9am-7pm

Thursday: 9am-7pm

Friday: Closed

Saturday: Closed

Sunday: 12pm-7pm

Click here for instructions on how to register and make an appointment. Be sure to select the correct campus from the drop-down box at the top of the WCOnline scheduler. Call either Writing Center with questions or concerns.

The Limits of a First-Year Writing Course

In a blog post on Inside Higher Ed last month, John Warner constructed an end-of-year list detailing some reasons why first-year writing may not fully prepare college students to write well in a variety of disciplines. His post, entitled "I Cannot Prepare Students to Write Their (History, Philosophy, Sociology, Poly Sci., etc...) Papers" begins as follows:

Occasionally, one hears grumbling from faculty who assign writing in their courses about the apparent lack of preparation of students to successfully execute those assignments. They wonder what’s happening in the general education writing courses when so many students seem to arrive in without the skills necessary to succeed at college-level writing, particularly research-based analytical work. 

As an instructor of first-year writing it can be hard not to take these things personally. 

I do my best to help students succeed for the future writing occasions they’ll confront in college and beyond, but the truth is, I cannot properly prepare them for what’s coming.

Click here to read John's blog and discover his reasons why students may be struggling in post-FYC genre writing. He also offers advice on assigning writing in non-English courses, along with a final word of optimism that "struggle is actually an excellent educational outcome. But that struggle must be meaningful to students, and so even if they are defeated, they are better armed for the next battle."