write a blog on students and discipline
Answers
Last semester, one of my students in my introductory composition course wrote a paper on the production and use of industrial and biological nitrogen fixation fertilizers. For the first time in my teaching experience, I felt that I had to do some research and extra readings in order to comprehend the content of the paper and provide feedback to the student. Luckily, I found lots of helpful information on the subject of the paper (thanks to Google), which gave me the knowledge that I didn’t have before and allowed me to appropriately respond to the student’s essay. And although this experience turned out to be a success, I am not sure if all writing instructors would have enough time and resources to invest in each of their students’ paper the way I did in that one.
So perhaps many teachers can relate to Spack’s (1988) arguments about teaching students “general principles of inquiry and rhetoric” (p. 29) instead of giving them tasks that “we ourselves cannot master” (p. 47) and thus doing students a disservice by not being able to provide appropriate feedback due to our “lack of control over content” (p. 37).
Providing Clear Objectives
However, while teaching students particular strategies and giving them tools that they can use in their future writing in different disciplines, we also need to make our objectives and purposes transparent. For example, Maimon mentioned peer review as a way of helping students become “socialized into the academic community” (as cited in Spack, 1988, p. 45). Although peer review can indeed help achieve this goal, I would be surprised if students were aware of it. Therefore, we need to make it clear to students why we do certain activities or why we assign certain tasks. For example, in my classes, I sometimes directly ask my students in the middle of a task, “Why are we doing this?” just to make sure that we are all on the same page.
Making our objectives transparent will not only help students in their future academic and professional experiences, but it will also help them stay more motivated, which in turn will make our own lessons rewarding experiences. For example, when I teach students how to write a research proposal, I like to discuss other types of proposals that they will most likely write in the future, as well as proposals that I myself have written and the successes that I had with well-written proposals.