Teaching Writing and Research Through Nested Assignments
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My name is Derek Malone-France, and I am an assistant professor in the University Writing Program here at GW. I teach writing intensive courses for first year students, so all undergraduates at this point. My own disciplinary background is in philosophy of religion and theology. And my interests include writing pedagogy and how the insights into student learning in composition theory and sort of more broadly what we now call writing studies can inform the teaching of upper division courses in the disciplines. So I Have done some research and work in this emerging area of writing intensive pedagogy for upper division humanities, specifically courses. I would say that from my own experience and my own reading and thinking about this that three fundamental principles stand out.
One, that a course needs to have a clearly structured pedagogy that is transparent to the students. A professor can gauge how well a course is structured by how clearly it is possible to articulate to the students the reasons for doing what they do. And I think that it is crucially important. I think it is one of the most important things that I do throughout the semester, but especially early on to engage my students, to bring them on board, and to become genuine partners in their own learning process is to explain to them very clearly, what are the rationales for both the major and minor components of the course. So I’ll start early in the semester by explaining to them the basic structure of the course, the kinds of work that we will be doing and the way that that work will become more complex and sophisticated over time so that they understand exactly why they are being assigned the sorts of readings and then the sorts of writing assignments that they do.
The second thing would be to have very clear, and again very clearly articulable, connections between the choices that are made in terms of the texts that are read and the sorts of intellectual work that the professor wants the students to do in the writing assignments. So that the choices that are made in the choices among the texts that one might be teaching on are driven by a sense of what concepts will these texts bring to the floor for the students? What patterns of thought, scholarly models, maybe even research models that can be found? So that again when you are discussing the texts you are also simultaneously discussing the students writing, and understanding their cognitive processes. One of my main goals is to make students more consciously aware of their own underlying unconscious cognitive methodologies. So the way their brain is operating and to give them a better sense of how they can, through that awareness and through a self consciousness about it, harness those processes, also refine them, complicate them in productive ways.
And then finally I would say once you’ve created and explained the strong structure for the course you’ve linked the reading material to the writing that the students will do. The most important structural aspect of all of my courses is what’s called a graduated or nested assignment sequence. Typically, I have students write three, what I call major writing projects. This is aside from very many informal response type writing assignments that they might have. So these are essay style projects which become gradually both longer and sophisticated in what they ask of the students. At the beginning of the semester I would start typically with something like a four to six page paper that has a very narrowly and very explicitly defined set of expectations and criteria that push the students to begin to make use of some of the most fundamental concepts that they are already getting under their belt through the initial readings and to respond to the text or texts that they have read in those first couple of weeks of class - to get them warmed up and thinking about the kind of intellectual work that we are doing. And then the second assignment would be something typically more like six to eight pages. It would build on the first. And then finally the third assignment would be – I should say the second assignment would introduce the initial outside research requirement as well. By the second paper I would want them to include some outside research and by that point we would have discussed the research process.
In UW20 we have the wonderful advantage of having partner librarians so would actually make visits to the library. The research librarians at GW are terrific and I am sure they would accommodate people beyond UW20 and I would suggest that as something that other professors should take advantage of. You also end up having wonderful discussions about content because if you can get them to hands on dig into the databases with the librarian and yourself there, then that distinction between content and methodology really breaks down. How would you research this? Where are you looking? Where should you look for this kind of information? And then for the third research project there would be a much more substantial research component. The students would have more freedom. Some of the students in a class like the one I’m describing now, the philosophy of religion class, might even undertake to articulate their own philosophical interpretation of religion, and some of them do quite well with that.
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