on wanting the "paragraph moment"

in what was likely the most convoluted, ill-formed prompt i’ve presented to students to date (and there have been many of these) i asked participants in my 486 class, the majority of whom are currently teaching or who plan someday to teach, what they hoped, expected, wanted students to get out of the time they (meaning the students) would spend working in their (meaning the 486 participants) classrooms. i asked the members of the course to consider the kind/range of attitudes, experiences, skill sets, etc. students might enter their classrooms with and where course participants (meaning the 486ers) might like to see their students end up at at the end of the year or semester. . .see what i mean about an in-class writing prompt gone horribly wrong? . . .as i recall, what actually came out of my mouth was much more unclear. even while recognizing this, i just kept talking and talking and making things worse.

in retrospect, i’m thinking it might have been more helpful to have instead placed the following quote from berlin’s “rhetoric and ideology” on the board:

“. . .a way of teaching is never innocent. Every pedagogy is imbricated in ideology, in a set of tacit assumptions about what is real, what is good, what is possible, and how power ought to be distributed” (492).

following this, i might have asked people to begin articulating what they take to be real, good and possible in the writing classroom (and why) and to speak to the issue of how they see power playing out or being distributed in that context.

no one asked me what i thought/wanted/hoped/expected from students. . .not that anyone should have, not that i was expecting anyone to. a few of the course participants have taken other classes with me so they probably have a sense of what I generally want/hope/expect to happen over the course of a semester. those who haven’t had courses with me have my course docs, and these certainly suggest something about my wants/hopes/expectations.

yet had someone asked me to respond to the prompt as well, this is likely what i would have offered:

for me, hands down, having an ideal semester would mean that everyone enrolled in the course would experience, at one time or another, and for however briefly, the “paragraph moment” i experienced at the start of the fall 1997 semester as a student in paul’s pro-sem. i begin (and could likely just as well end) with this because it’s been my experience that everything and/or anything else i could think of listing here stems from, or is otherwise connected to, that moment. for instance, i’d like students to consider if there’s really anything to it when i insist (as i often do) that inquiry ends with judgment and that putting off judgment and entertaining instead other options, readings, uses or potentials for a person, place, attitude or thing can lead us to some pretty interesting places. i’d like to see students become more cognizant of, and more able to speak to the impact of the choices they make (as well as those made for them) while engaging in a wide variety of communicative practices. i’d like students to leave my course with more questions than they had when they entered the course. i’d like students to leave the course with a perhaps different (i.e., a more complex, enriched or expansive) understanding of what revision and collaboration can and often do involve. to consider that revision need not always or only signal the act of perfecting a text but re-seeing and with this re-assessing a text’s potential to do different kinds of work with different people, materials, conventions, and spaces. to consider that collaboration is not always or only something we do when we are placed into groups with other people. that even when it appears we are mostly working alone, it is always still a joint effort, that we are collaborating with tools, conventions, genres, spaces, histories, memories of other people and experiences, and so on.


i want to students to be less concerned with coming up with the perfect title, transition, intro, or paragraph and to consider instead what titles, transitions, intros, or paragraphs/chunks might be comprised of and to consider how they might potentially (and/or currently do) function more generally, say for instance, across different media. in the case of transitions, how, for instance, does one indicate, read and respond to cues having to do with the process of moving on (moving back, forward, changing the subject, whatever) in paintings, in books, in lifetime movies, in songs, in diaries, in resumes, in credit card applications, in essays published in a specific journal, in a subdivision, or on a city street?