Posted 9:44 p.m. Monday, Oct. 30, 2023
A Simple Strategy for Teaching Students
Hi! I’m Chris McCracken, the new CATL Writing Fellow. I’m here to help you help your students learn through writing. I want to share a small tip that can make a big difference in how your students read, write, and think:
Encourage your students to always attribute claims to the authors who made them.
That’s it! Easy. And I’m not even talking about the more complex issue of getting them to cite sources in their writing (though that’s important, too). It’s simpler than that. When they say, “The book says X,” encourage them to say, “The author says X.” When they write, “The article argues X,” or “The book argues X,” encourage them to write, “The authors argue X.”
It’s such a small thing, but here’s why it matters: Approaching written knowledge as claims that actual living, breathing humans put in writing, and understanding that those claims can conflict and be tested, helps students read and write with authority. Approaching written knowledge as free-floating sets of facts keeps students feeling as though they’re outsiders.
“But who says?” you ask, sagely, as your extensive academic training has taught you to do. Great question! And asking it shows why you’re the instructor! Nearly 20 years ago, two writing studies researchers, Ann Penrose and Cheryl Geisler, gave two students the same writing task. One student, Janet, was a first-year student and the other, Roger, was finishing up his doctoral work in philosophy. Janet and Roger were given some conflicting scholarship on the concept of paternalism and asked to write about the concept—to define it and write a justification of it. Penrose and Geisler asked the students to think aloud and record their thoughts as they worked through the writing task, they interviewed them, and they compared the students’ drafts. Their goal wasn’t to rate the arguments against each other. Rather, they wanted to see how a student writer with more disciplinary expertise approached this task as compared to a novice student writer.
Janet, the first-year student, worked toward determining which of the arguments was the true one. She saw her task as reporting on the truth of a matter that couldn’t be so reduced. She wanted to align her definition with the “correct” one, and then write her justification. In doing so, she left out the positions that disagreed with the definition she settled on, and, when she came up with her own clever refutations of the “correct” definition, she dismissed her very good points because they complicated things too much. At one point, Janet even developed her own sub-category of paternalism, but discarded it entirely because she didn’t think she was allowed to do that.
But Roger, Penrose and Geisler noted, “saw his task as one of examining a set of alternative positions which had been put forward by prior authors on paternalism.” So Roger connected arguments to the authors who made them, and, when he came across contradictions between authors, he used those disagreements as a springboard for exploring the complexity of the topic. He developed examples around these disagreements and felt free to insert those examples into his writing, eventually coming to a very tentative definition and justification of paternalism.
Again, Penrose and Geisler fully expected Roger to write a more sophisticated response to the prompt. But they were interested in how to account for the differences between the two. They identify four things that Roger understood about the texts they read that Janet didn’t seem to understand:
- Texts are authored.
- Authors present knowledge in the form of claims.
- Knowledge claims can conflict.
- Knowledge claims can be tested.
Janet’s and Roger’s story gestures toward a common theme in research into how students are socialized into their academic disciplines and start to consider themselves full-fledged members. That socialization process starts with understanding that texts are authored, which implies that the knowledge claims that show up in those texts belong to those authors. From there, it’s easier to see how knowledge claims can conflict and be tested. Humans made those claims, after all! Of course they’re not set in stone! Students may then feel more confident to insert themselves into scholarly conversations rather than reporting on established facts. They may feel like they have more agency—more authority.
Would you like more useful strategies for teaching reading and writing? Send me an email! Meet with me! I’m always happy to talk about this stuff.