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| Term Paper Galore (Photo credit: Bright Green Pants) |
Like most of us who teach the first-year comp courses, I began by allowing students to select their own topics (with the usual few taboos), most of which had no academic significance, and then I watched most of them flounder around as they produced papers that didn't do what research papers are supposed to do and were quite boring on top of it. Additionally, I could not guide them as well as I wanted to, since I generally had little expertise in their topic areas (i.e., I didn't know the important scholars in the field, and so on). This situation was not preparing them at all for the reality they would be facing in other courses as they went on. Imagine a sociology class, for example, where you were told that you could pick any topic!
After a few years of frustration, I began looking for ideas on how to give them a more realistic assignment, one that could be accomplished within the time available both inside and outside the course. This was not an easy task, for many reasons. First of all, how could I give them a realistic paper assignment without having to teach what would essentially be another course within the course? I thought back to my own experience as a first-year student, and I realized that what I had been taught about teaching this course in grad school was nothing like the way I had learned to write a research paper back in 1974.
When I started college at what is now UIC but was then the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle Campus (I still think of it as Circle), I was a sulky 17 year old with a load of adolescent resentment. So, when I looked over the section list for the research paper course, I selected one that had the intriguing title, "Visions of Hell." It fit my mood. It was taught by a doctoral student, whose name I cannot now recall, and over the ten-week term (Circle was on a quarter system rather than semesters) we read several works of literature that had to do with, well, visions of hell. The research paper assignment was to pick a particular work and analyze its specific vision of hell based on criteria that we developed in class as well as criteria we found through research.
In the intervening years, the idea of the research paper course being a literature course gradually began to die out, for a bunch of reasons that I won't go into here, and I think this was part of the problem. I was taught to write a paper that analyzed a specific object (in my case, a work of literature, but it could have been a population, a natural phenomenon, a political event, whatever) using a method developed from authoritative sources in relevant areas in order to arrive at -- tah dah!-- new knowledge. The fact that I learned this using a work of literature did not matter: the overall concept is the same for anything under analysis, in any discipline.
At my current school, where I cannot require students to buy additional texts beyond the mandated ones (which are not literature-based), I had to come up with an assignment that would rely on material available to them without purchase. A few quick in-class surveys revealed that my students ALL had access to films, which they also enjoyed (a plus when you are already making them read a lot of unfamiliar and often difficult material in their research). I'm a film buff myself, so I went with that. I set aside three or four class periods to do a brief lecture/demo of several critical approaches (gender, cultural, and disability studies, myth crit, and shame theory) and prepared a list of films (ones I either owned or could borrow from family or friends) divided into those approach categories.
The results, so far, are almost all positive, and the best one has to be that my drop rate has gone down dramatically. Most of my students are finishing the course with a passing grade, and all of them are producing actual scholarly work, creating new knowledge. It's rarely breathtaking new knowledge, but they are saying things about these films that nobody has said before them. Their critical thinking and revision skills are vastly improved, based on what I've read of their work.
Of course, there are some negatives, mostly coming out of them being pushed out of their comfort zones. They come in expecting to do the same kind of research they did in high school, and some of them like to blame me for making them work harder than that. That hasn't changed from the method I used before. Overall, I'm pleased with the way things are going, but I've been making constant adjustments in the course since making the switch.
So, if you were wondering what Rhonda was talking about in some of her posts, the mystery is solved. I am collecting data as I go along with an eye to an eventual article. We'll see how it goes.
