Week 4: Redemption

Day 6: Group work on Henrietta Lacks. Come up with research questions (2 good ones, so at least 6 per group) and then figure out which academics might ask those questions. Match the questions to the academics and post them on the wiki page.

The point here was to redeem the previous day, reinforce the stasis grid, and talk more thoroughly about different academic discourse communities and the subfields within them. I had them bring in their laptops, if possible, and it worked perfectly for all three sections: each group had at least two laptops in it, so one student could pull up the "experts" page on the UMD website for Henrietta Lacks and the other student could pull up the class wiki site. Prior to class, I had created 7 different pages, A-G. Once the groups were formed "group up in such a way that every group has at least two laptops. You may need to move around a little" (N.B.: this is after a couple of days of "get into groups of 3--just clump up in your neighborhood" and a couple of days of counting off from 1-7. The "get together by laptop" is ideal in that it's practical and gives them autonomy to choose their groups, to an extent. I pay close attention to this piece, the balance between managing the whole class and enabling it to be student-run. Forming groups may sound insignificant, but it's not--it's quite the opposite, actually. Basically, if I'm going to make an executive decision about something (forming groups) that they are perfectly capable of doing by themselves, I need to earn the right to do so. I do want that executive decision in draft workshops, so worrying about who is working with whom in class every day would be a) lame, b) a waste of time, and c) needlessly controlling.

Anyway: they did this on the class wiki page, which was the other main point of today: to get them working on the wikis in groups so that they could teach each other how to use them. They all made their individual wiki pages on the first day, so they figured it out, but I gave them step by step directions for that. Here, three weeks later, they could now refresh their memories in class with their peers as a precursor to lots of wiki work in the next couple of weeks.

After this, which took about 20 minutes, we came back as a full class and each group offered one question that I put on the board in the appropriate stasis column. Actually: most of the time, the students told me where to put it. Some were right. Some were right-ish. Some questions, as always, can be put in a couple of different categories, depending how the question is worded. After this, they took out their 3 topics memos and passed those around to their group members (same groups) for feedback/ brainstorming.

This was a tight day, for I had a tutor from the Writing Center come in and chat with us, explaining what happens in there. That took about ten minutes off of the day, so we had just over an hour to cover everything above. Just enough time so that they weren't too rushed but not too much time (ha--as if there is *ever* too much time in my classes!). Redeemed.