What's so Interesting About You?

I wanted to begin the semester in my composition classes with a preliminary collaboration exercise and I wanted it to be low stakes, low stress, and interesting. I also wanted the students to become more comfortable with each other as they will be working together all semester and trust is vital to successful brainstorming and peer review sessions. In lieu of a traditional introduction exercise, then, I had them to work in pairs to interview each other on two points so that the interviewers could introduce the interviewees to their peers.

These were their two prompts: “Tell us an interesting fact about yourself” and “Either tell us something amusing that you experienced or witnessed or tell something interesting about the world around us that you think we may not know.” Allowing ten to fifteen minutes for the interviews, we then moved on to introductions; the interviewer introduced the interviewee, each of whom raised a hand to identify him or herself, and then the interviewer shared the information from the interview. We learned who was left-handed, who came from large families, who had traveled where, and we learned that octopi have three hearts and that when skydiving one can see the curvature of the earth. More importantly, as I explained to the students, they began to know their peers better and to become familiar with how generative interviews worked, as such peer interviews are how we will begin work on each paper this semester. With the remaining class time, we formally introduced the first assignment and reminded all that when class resumes, we will be conducting generative peer interviews for their research proposals.