Active and Collaborative!
The overview essays, wherein students report on their stages of progress regarding their final analysis papers, seem to indicate that bringing together the strategies of active learning with the rewards of reflective writing is working well. Specifically, I see most students working earlier and more thoughtfully on their analyses of the intersections between texts and the larger culture. The essays largely follow the same format, that is, a report on how each group arrived at its larger theme, insight into how each individual student’s thesis is developing, and speculation about the questions left to be answered.
As I have observed earlier, this has had the benefit of letting me see more clearly how they approach their assignment. For example, “This semester,” one of my students writes, “I, along with four of my peers in American literature, have decided to focus our attention in our readings and discussions on the topic of civil rights. We concurred that civil rights is broad enough to examine in a group of five individuals, yet specific enough to condense our thoughts into an analysis limited to eight to ten pages.” Maybe I could have fairly guessed how this negotiation might occur, but now I have had this repeatedly and concretely confirmed, and so in tweaking the assignment for a future course, I may wish to caution them about dismissing topics too quickly because they seem narrower and, then, eliminating too soon what might have been a more interesting and productive path for them. Or I might revisit the topics, which I based on my students’ reported majors, to see if I can’t address the perceived narrowness.
But many students realized that picking the perceived broader topics did not necessarily prevent them from pursuing their more particular interests. As a second student observes, “At the time of discussion, we decided first to eliminate those themes which would likely be (a) most popular and/or (b) too scarce in the literature and thus limit our options for analysis. These topics that were eliminated were: civil rights, education, philosophy, literary trends, and art. This is not to say that our final collaboration will have these elements absent in their entirety; on the contrary, depending on the literature selected for our analysis, some themes will be necessarily unavoidable.”
I particularly liked the detailed description of the process that some of my students recorded. “We took some time to complete a worksheet,” a third student comments, “that was designed to help our group brainstorm which available category or analytical theme would be most appropriate for each member’s personal and professional interests. The worksheet asked questions about hobbies and goals, as well as themes that we had seen in the texts which we had already read. One of the group members quickly grabbed a pen and started to ask each member the questions from the sheet and then listed the responses he received. From group member to group member he went, recording each one’s thoughts, before he went back, and looked for points of overlap within each person’s responses and the given themes. Once the tallies were counted, it was clear that the winning theme would be “Environment” but we already had some differences within that category.” Circulating around the room as the groups were originally on this task, I could be reasonably certain that the process was working, but descriptions such as this one confirmed that the active and collaborative elements were there and were working as I would wish them to.
As useful as these insights are proving to be, I am even more pleased to hear the students reporting on how the collaborative element of the group project is benefitting them. This, of course, was the principle difference between my composition eportfolio design and the design for literature; the literature eportfolios would be created by each group rather than a separate eportfolio for each student. Although it is a general observation, a fourth student wrote that “[a]lthough the individual work is helpful, the most beneficial tool to me is the group work. This type of work helps introduce more ideas, as it provides several perspectives of the text.” And this sentiment was echoed by a fifth student: “I actually am really nervous about this whole project, slightly because when I read anything I don’t fully understand it right away, but I’m lucky to have the group that I have. Everyone in my group is super helpful and they made the whole deciding process super easy. I’m glad they took everyone’s opinions when deciding the topic and thoroughly explained how that topic can be applied to our e-portfolio and the final essay.” So it would appear that not only are they taking more responsibility for their own work, but they are also recognizing their responsibility to their peers.
Finally, let me close this blog post with a comment from a sixth student: “We have also been encouraging each other to make personal progress as well. For me personally, the group discussions have been a necessary catalyst, pushing me to start working on my final analysis paper. Though we are off to a wonderful start, there is still much to be completed, so we must remember to keep up the hard work as a group and as individuals.” Admittedly some of this might be writing to the audience of the teacher; however, their in-class discussion and presentations seem to corroborate this point and so I am hoping that the final products, the analysis papers and the eportfolios, will bear this out.
