Overview Interviews

I was concerned today that my composition students might not be far enough along for group discussions about their eportfolio venture or their first paper assignment, the overview essay, but I went ahead with another set of interview questions and an idea my colleague Dr. Doukopoulos gave me yesterday: to divide them into sets of three to share turns being the interviewer, the interviewee, and the recorder of the interview. Between the questions and the modification of the generative interview experience, the class turned out to be fairly productive. Among the many interesting cultural trends my students say that they are investigating are the lifestyle of asexuality, transgender rights, the contemporizing of traditional worship services, the effects of fashion trends on young first-world citizens, the rise of digital marketing, I-pads in elementary education, digital technology and exercise, and alternative treatments for cancer. Many of these will need some further refinement and specification, but for this stage of their semester project, this is rather good and I was pleased. Moreover, it was encouraging to see them building trust in each other, which I hope later will also translate into trust in themselves. In fact, one thing I was reminded of watching them work was that it is too easy to dismiss their terse responses as laziness, when I believe in most cases it is a lack of confidence and trust in their own ideas and their own thinking.