BRIAN McELWAIN INTRODUCTION FOR FACULTY TO SEQUENCED WRITING ASSIGNMENTS The single most important thing that I’ve learned over the course of the Center for Writing Excellence/CELT four-day Workshop on Improving Student Writing is the importance of breaking large and/or complex assignments down into component parts. In the process of doing this, I’ve come to realize that I’ve often expected a great deal without adequately specifying or engaging students in the kind of process that would help them to successfully complete the larger project. So it has happened that the most interesting (to me) projects result in the most disappointing products from the students—not necessarily because of their laziness, dullness, etc., but because I failed to build up the preliminary and immediate structure that would help them get to a successfully developed and finished project. To illustrate what I mean here, let me say a little bit about an assignment sequence that I’ve developed to help students in IDS 159 (Strength through Cultural Diversity) complete an unusual assignment that I call an Empathic Book Response Paper. This paper is focused on the articulation of an empathic understanding of the life experiences, feelings, perspectives, etc., of the author of a memoir. (I should note that students are required to choose memoirs written by people who position themselves in relation to one or more aspects of cultural diversity.) Briefly, I’m now going to require both a Reading Log and a Bio-Poem in the weeks before the Book Response Paper is due. The Reading Logs will provide students a record of the things they noticed as significant during the initial reading of the book and it will help them to more easily find and return for closer reading of those initially noted significant episodes—along with their personal reactions. This is a record of the “raw material” out of which the paper will be written. The Bio-Poem is a kind of intermediate step which will start them along the process of prioritizing and organizing. They will also share their Bio-Poems in small groups to get the reactions of their peers to their developing ideas. The two steps should substantially increase the development of ideas and emotional depth of their papers.
BRIAN McELWAIN SEQUENCED WRITING ASSIGNMENTS FOR STUDENTS IDS159 Strength through Cultural Diversity Brian McElwain
Empathic Book Response Sequence Books for Empathic Book Response Papers are chosen by students from a list of first-person narratives (mostly memoirs, but a few fictional pieces are on the list) provided by the instructor. Each student must choose a book written by (or from the perspective of) someone whose position in terms of at least one major aspect of cultural diversity is different from that of the student. For example, a Black student might choose a book focused on the experience of a Native American, a straight female student that of a bisexual man or woman, a Christian student that of a practitioner of Buddhism, Judaism, or Islam, etc. The options that I provide to the students in terms of book choices are biased in the direction of forcing them to understand and articulate the perspectives of marginalized people to whom they’ve likely had limited—if any—exposure. I believe that developing greater facility for empathy will enable students to engage more fully and productively when the time comes to consider what might be done to address the variety of diversity- and social justice-related problems that confront our society. Thus, a major course objective (especially over the first half of the semester) is for students to develop their capacity to feel—and articulate—empathy with a variety of marginalized people. This assignment sequence will help students to dig deeply into the life experience of one marginalized person.
Reading Log (5 points—due week 5) Think of this as a journal in which you’ll make notes about a wide variety of important things as they occur to you during your reading of the book you’ve selected for your Empathic Book Response Paper. Among the most obvious kinds of things that you might include are brief summaries of particularly important events/episodes in the narrative, recurring themes/images/feelings articulated by the author, and your personal reactions to the text (on both cognitive and emotional levels). But don’t limit yourself to these categories that I’ve mentioned. This is YOUR Reading Log, so make it your own. Make it a record of your own experience of reading the book. (The time will come soon enough for you to shape your writing about your book according to a specific structure that I’ll provide, but this is not that time.) However, let me make a suggestion here…consider including references to the specific page(s) that prompt each entry in your log so that you can easily return to the selections that you found particularly significant. This will be very helpful to you when you’re working on your Bio-Poem and your Empathic Book Response Paper. You’ll earn points for your Reading Log based on clearly demonstrating to me that you read the book carefully, took the time to reflect on the significance of what you were reading along the way, and allowed the protagonist’s experience to affect you. If you’ve done so, then I’ll clearly see in your Reading Log lots of interesting “raw material” which you’d be able to use in the development of your Bio-Poem and your Empathic Book Response Paper. I hope to see much that is interesting, specific to the protagonist and personal rather than mundane, obvious, impersonal, or generic. Bio-Poem (5 points—due week 6) Completing this second assignment in the Empathic Book Response sequence will require you to make a variety of choices about what’s most important in the book that you read. The work that you put into your Reading Log will pay off when you’re developing your bio-poem. You may not find specific items from your Reading Log to plug directly into any of the lines of the Bio-Poem, but your identification of a variety of significant points in the text will help you to more quickly locate selections to support your decisions. Using the book that you’ve selected for your Empathic Book Response Paper, write a “bio-poem” about the author/protagonist of the book using the formula laid out below. You will be sharing these poems with your classmates and getting feedback from them that will help you to write your Empathic Book Response Paper. When you read your poem to your classmates, they will have questions for you and want to know more about your choices in writing your poem. Those questions will then help you to write your formal paper with a better sense of the kinds of questions, interests, etc., that your readers will have. Further, the questions and comments of your peers will spur you to provide supporting evidence for the choices you made in writing your bio-poem. Again, this will help you to think about how you’ll want to support your assertions in your formal paper. Line 1: Full name Line 2: Four roles occupied by author/protagonist Line 3: Relative of (sister of, brother of, mother of, father of, cousin of, friend of, etc.) Line 4: Lover of______ (list three things or people) Line 5: Who feels______ (list three) Line 6: Who needs_______ (list three) Line 7: Who fears_______ (list three) Line 8: Who gives_______ (list three) Line 9: Who would like to______ (list three) Line 10: Resident of______ Line 11: Familiar or nickname (insert example here) This assignment requires you to organize and prioritize the “raw material” of your initial responses as recorded in your Reading Log—though this is not to say that you should only include things that you cited there. I expect you’ll find it helpful to making notes about your discoveries as you return to your book and re-read sections of it after you’ve turned in your original Reading Log. As I mentioned previously, it’s unlikely that you’ll find everything that you need to construct your Bio-Poem in your original Reading Log, but that’s going to be a valuable guide for you. In my evaluation of your Bio-Poem, I will be paying attention to whether you’ve organized it according to the guidelines provided and hoping to get a sense of the protagonist as a dynamic, complicated person. I’ll expect to see emotional, cognitive, and behavioral tensions and conflicts—implicit or explicit—among the lines of your poem. And since this is a poem, I’ll be looking for you to play with language. Using evocative language will give your Bio-Poem life that will get more interesting responses from your peers and carry over into the writing of your Empathic Book Response Paper.
Empathic Book Response Paper (15 points—due week 8) 1. The main purpose of this assignment is to help you to delve deeply into the life experience of the author/protagonist of the autobiographical book you’ve chosen to read. Your goal should be to “step into the shoes” of the author and walk around in them. Your efforts should be focused on getting to know as intimately as possible how the author thinks and feels about the world and her life in it.
3. Your synopsis should be a brief overview of the book as a whole which gives your reader a clear sense of the context within which to understand the remainder of the paper. Your synopsis should be no more than one page in length.
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