Teaching the Election and Public Trauma

Yesterday, I joined about half a dozen colleagues to discuss how we're handling the election and "public trauma" (e.g., continued police shootings of unarmed black men) in our classes. We never got past the election, which many would--and do--argue is its own public trauma. (Just today, for example, the New York Times published "Talking to Your Therapist about Election Anxiety.").

Some of my colleagues reported that it's been hard getting their students talking about the election at all. Perhaps students are exhausted. Perhaps they themselves are traumatized. I rue the fact that their first opportunity to vote is in this election, after two election cycles in which we had the option of voting for a rock star (at least in 2008). My students have working memories of just two presidents: Obama and George W. Now we're facing an election in which millions of Americans--the majority, even?--aren't voting for a candidate so much as they're voting against the other one.

Despite this, I've been having a good time in my class. I love teaching in big election years. Even this one. There is no better way to teach rhetorical analysis, argumentation, and logical fallacies than by analyzing political rhetoric, and I think that one can do so without making it so much about the rhetor than by making it about the audience. It's not about Trump or Clinton. It's about the values and beliefs their arguments are grounded in.

And it's about the evidence.

I first taught a major Presidential election in 2008, at Utah State. Most of my students shared a set of values and beliefs that differed from mine; which quickly taught me how to "teach the election" in a way that respected everyone's political perspectives (including mine): through Toulmin theory. If we make the entire conversation about the audience, then we're able to hold constructive conversations about why an argument may work for some people, yet not others. It's not about the rhetor being right or wrong (or worse); it's about what the intended audience needs.

I've been incredibly fortunate this semester to be able to apply issues that are furiously debated nationwide into my class. Less than a week before the semester began, University of Chicago Dean of Students sent incoming students his letter warning them that Chicago does not condone "safe spaces" or "trigger warnings." We got a lot of mileage out of that for the first month, which helped us establish the kind of classroom environment we want to have. I've used the safe space debate for a few semesters now, but this was the first one in which the course started with that topic. It worked really well not only to establish our classroom climate but also, I realize now, to prepare us for our conversations about the election (and more: while we have not explicitly addressed Milo Yanniapolous in class, the fact that he's coming here next week after having been banned from Twitter makes this conversation even more exigent).

I have my students use Twitter for a variety of reasons--to strengthen community in our blended class, to enter ongoing, public conversations responsibly, to research, to connect with others who are researching similar topics, to practice writing in different genres and context. Yesterday, we flooded Twitter with #whyIwrite testimonies for the National Day on Writing. We used it for the first two Presidential debates, as well.

For the first one, I asked students to live tweet the debate and identify logical fallacies the candidates employed, an assignment I've used several times. It's fun. And useful. Students don't even really need formal instruction on logical fallacies (many of them got it in high school, anyway); they just need a decent list of them and some good direction, both of which I provide on the prompt.

For the second debate, I asked students to analyze the evidence that the candidates used to support their arguments--including how they frame it--determine its effectiveness, and fact check it. I'm proud of this assignment; students did quite well with it: Debate #2 Activity. Most of them indicated that they didn't know very much about the subject they chose to analyze, so if nothing else, they learned a thing or two about issues like the Affordable Care Act, trade deals, and foreign policy.

Two days later, we watched John Oliver's February 14, 2016 segment on voter IDs, which analyzes (and effectively debunks) the argument that photo IDs are necessary at the polls to prevent voter fraud. (Shout out to Katherine Joshi and her UTAs for bringing this episode to my attention).

Students were instructed to write down every piece of evidence that Oliver employed to support his argument, which they'd been prepped for by reading about the rhetorical use of evidence in Inventing Arguments  [the relevant chapter is from Ramage, Bean, and Johnson's Writing Arguments) and The DK Handbook. We discussed why his choices were effective for his intended audience. I then asked him if those who support voter IDs would accept his argument, like the politicians Oliver uses in this segments. After a couple of moments of silence, students shook their heads no. "Why not?" I asked. "Why would they reject this? On what grounds?" "Well...they could attack his ethos...they point out that he's a comedian, so what does he know." "Excellent. What else?" "They could refute his evidence." "Yes, they could. He cites a lot of solid evidence, though, like the Brennan report." "Yeah but a resistant audience could still find a way to refute it."

Exactly.

And there's the rub. We live in a world in which facts don't matter. We're operating in multiple universes in which facts are facts to some people and conspiracies to others. (Indeed, given Trump's recent complaints of a rigged election, this lesson plan could not have been more timely. Lest I be accused of overstepping my bounds, note that this lesson plan occurred just before Trump's latest barrage of election-rigging accusations.) In light of this, I've found that the best I can do is teach students how to craft Rogerian arguments (which is what this lesson plan led to), ones that rely less on factual evidence and more on audience beliefs and values. This strategy serves me in a comp/ rhet course that's so heavily grounded in argumentation. What it means for the future of civic discourse and democracy is anyone's guess (or fear).

On a more uplifting note, I'll end with this lovely message from our Canadian neighbors:

Preparing and Engaging Students: One Strategy to Connect Reading and Writing

"Close your eyes," I told my 388V students, those who serve as Undergraduate Teaching Assistants (UTAs) in writing classes, at the beginning of class the other day. "Imagine you are in the class for which you are UTAing. Your instructor just finished explaining the upcoming assignment and that the draft is due in a few days. Your students look uncomfortable--their faces range from confused to scared to angry. They don't feel prepared. You sympathize; it seems too fast. What could you do in this situation? How might you intervene? Freewrite for two minutes. Then we'll discuss."

This opening prompt wasn't hypothetical: it's exactly what had happened in my 101 class the day prior. Well, perhaps I exaggerated the student reactions; I don't recall seeing outright anger or fear on my 101 students' faces. Still, the Inquiry paper has come quickly. We haven't emphasized narrative enough. Or the writing process. Or refining the core research question. Not enough, anyway.

My 388V students offered a range of suggestions to this scenario, one that is all too common in our writing courses that easily pack two semesters' worth of learning outcomes into a mere 14 weeks:

• extend the deadline
• cut an assignment later in the semester (to make more time for the above)
• add extra UTA office hours
• contextualize the assignment as one piece of a larger whole 

Note that each solution speaks to a different need. The most common one--extend the deadline--gives students more time on their own. The second one acknowledges an overly ambitious syllabus that covers too much for the deep learning and transfer we all aspire to foster. The third affords more opportunities for students to seek and receive direct feedback. The fourth has the most to do with direct instruction: how we frame what we ask students to do. 

Extending the deadline is the most obvious, and arguably the easiest, solution, though I don't think it's the best one. First, it's likely to cause problems later on, as the whole semester is tightly packed. More importantly, if the problem is that students are underprepared, the solution is not that they have more time. They don't need more time. They need more guidance. They need more direct instruction, more practice, and more feedback. 

Before continuing, I need to give my 101 students their due credit. They are a particularly smart, self-motivated bunch. Several of them will figure it out on their own; our course site is teeming with tips, guides, and examples. The assignment prompt is explicit. They'll likely work it out.

Yet there's a time and a place to throw students to the wolves and have them figure things out on their own. I know this: I do it all the time in the earlier stages of a new unit. Students need to know what they don't know in order to value my instruction, the readings, the exercises, the activities. But this is different. We're past the early stages. They need to practice and get formative feedback. They'll get feedback from each other in the draft workshop, but they need my--and my UTAs'--feedback, as well.

This anecdote speaks to several pedagogical issues; the one I am most interested in at the moment concerns "getting students to do the readings," as Linda B. Nilson puts it in Teaching at Its Best. I recalled Michael Bunn's "Motivation and Connection: Teaching Reading (and Writing) in the Composition Classroom" (2013), which my 388V students recently read, as well. Yet neither Nilson nor Bunn are addressing the particular type of reading that I am this week in 101: instructional texts. The main reading I want students to read--and own--this week is a mere six pages out of Wysocki's and Lynch's DK Handbook (4th edition): summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting. To most students, this is something they've been taught before. Likely several times. 

If I were a student in my own class, I'd open the book to those pages, see what they're about, and skim them in approximately 17 seconds. I'd see no reason to do any more than that. 

So, instead of doing what I usually do--assigning the pages and pleading with them in bold, red font to read the pages carefully--I didn't assign them as an isolated task. I wove the reading into a brand new, ridiculously convoluted activity. One of my "Lyra Specials." I cringed as I reviewed it in Google Docs. When I shared this new "Using Sources Activity" with my own UTAs, I asked them if students would be plotting my death. To my surprise, they said no. I had written it so that it was the only homework task between Tuesday and Thursday, and I explicitly stated that the end product--a paragraph--could be inserted directly into the upcoming draft. "This is good to mention," one of my UTAs said. "Yeah, this will give them an incentive." A purpose for doing it.

The activity has several purposes:

• to understand--truly understand--the difference between patch writing and paraphrasing, which I'm fairly certain is impossible without practicing both. In this exercise, students are only doing one of these (paraphrasing), but it's better than just reading about it. I have no reason to ask them to practice patch writing individually--it wouldn't be something that they can use. That's an in-class, collaborative exercise, not an out-of-class, individual task.
• to connect the "instructional reading" to their writing assignments (and, more importantly, of course, the writing they will do in all of their classes)
• to apply what they're learning in a low-stakes activity 
• to receive prompt, formative feedback on a core skill prior to finishing their drafts (should I choose to do so, which I will. I only have one 101 section this semester, so I can do it. In other semesters, this would be much more challenging).

The real student learning objectives are here:

• Distinguish between summarizing, patch writing, and paraphrasing
• Evaluate which source would be best for a given task
• Read scholarly sources efficiently
• Analyze arguments at a college level

I've read just a couple of the students' paragraphs so far, and I am ecstatic--these are exceptionally strong draft paragraphs that engage scholarly sources. To more thoroughly address the issue of adequate preparation that I open with in this post, I plan to update next week's homework schedule to incorporate more direct (read: forced) revision tasks. 

Ultimately, I don't want my awesome students to create and submit mediocre-to-decent Inquiry Papers, the first major--and arguably most important--assignment of the semester. I want awesome students to write awesome inquiries. And that means doing more on my end to help them do that.

Note: This Google Doc link to the Using Sources Activity allows for comments, which I warmly welcome.