DAJ Survey Part Deux

The week before Spring Break, I asked the students to complete another DAJ survey. I want to write a quick run-down of the results—by no means a scientific analysis. I’m working more with the comments here than the quantitative results.

1. The responses seem to break down to three groups, with the largest being the middle one:

• Those who see the DAJ as practice for critical analysis in general, not just for the class assignments. (4 out of 21)
• Those who see the DAJ as a sometimes useful, though perhaps too demanding of an assignment. (12 out of 21)
• Those who see the DAJ as busy work or the equivalent. (5 out of 21)

2. In the “busywork” responses, two themes emerge, represented by the following quotes:

• “Because they are not graded daily or reviewed enough I do not feel they are beneficial but more of a burden.”
• “I feel the application that is meant to happen in the DAJ happens in class. The DAJ is a good reinforcement, but not necessarily a supplement.”

The first comment seems a direct response to the decision I made not to comment on the DAJ entries in the first collection. I can understand how we could see an assignment that is not responded to as somehow less meaningful than the ones that get comments all over. But that idea suggests that assignments meant to foster invention, understanding, and independence should be submitted to the same assessment lens as those meant to demonstrate learning and mastery.

The second comment, while arguing against itself, represents the theme of students not seeing a pedagogical value to the work. I really don’t know why they don’t see it, and perhaps some have just been frustrated by the assessment measures used in the class in the first place. It seems that if I’m asking students to hone their analytical skills, they have to have a space where they can practice regularly. I guess some might suggest that practice shouldn’t be assessed. But honestly, I think I’ve assessed the journals (and participation) fairly liberally. By that I mean I’ve looked in the journals for completion and attempts at thinking through interesting features of texts. For participation, I’ve taken students own interpretations of each other’s work into consideration and I’ve averaged or cancelled-out the first round of scores. I really do feel like I’ve given the students the benefit of the doubt all the way around.

3. The largest group of responses suggests that students want to be faithful to the assignment, but have too many distractions and obligations to maintain a steady focus on the journals. Most of the respondents say they are caught up but that they do the entries in large chunks (see earlier entry). This group in general says it would benefit from me collecting the journals more often and regularly. I could do that, but it seems doing so would take the journals out of the students’ hands way too much. It could be that I should move the DAJ on-line; not through Blackboard, but on Blogger or myspace or something. I’d like to find a way for students to upload images and texts. I could respond more easily (through the comment sections) and the students would get the sense that I’m watching—which is what many of them seem to want.

I’m feeling at times like a rebel and a hypocrite. While I think I’m offering students a different kind of class, I am policing the students, primarily because I truly believe that what I’m asking them to do will benefit them in the class and beyond. And it’s hard not to have some kind of missionary zeal in what I’m asking them to do. At the same time, this policing only re-establishes my authority in ways I’m not exactly comfortable with. Some students—see some of the comments in the entries below—are pointing out this hypocrisy. Perhaps it’s just a necessary evil—and perhaps we all need to get more comfortable with making the mechanisms of the classroom more overt. I have to admit to being stymied by some of the criticism, a little of which seems like the result of performance anxiety. But other parts of it seem like a real dissatisfaction with the class, and I don’t know how to change that.

Cheat the System

First off, long delay in posting. Like everyone else, I’ve been buried under work—both professional and personal. I’m hoping spring break (next week) can get me back on track. I have to assess the (very good) posters and the group papers, and to plan the final projects. It’s good to be busy, I suppose, but I feel on the edge of dropping some major ball.

Today the groups used Foucault to analyze topics I had passed out last week. The topics were abortion laws, academic integrity, immigration policy, music downloading, and drug laws. I was greatly impressed by the presentations and the conversations they sparked. In fact, I was taking notes during several of them. A few major points:

1. I also collected the peer review sheets today, and my first quick glance tells me that they are not all that different from the first set. That is, students are pretty generous with each other. There are some negative reviews, and it’s clear that some students just don’t like working in groups. But the discussions today seemed to have demonstrated that the students who have a vested interested in the class can really pull things together. It’s not good that some students are riding on the coattails of others, but I take some solace in knowing that the level of discourse is raised by a good number of students who want to have intellectual conversation.

2. I’m taken by this point from the group on academic integrity: students cheat as a way of subverting an educational system that has come to value things they simply do not. Sure some cheat because they are unprepared, but according to this thesis, others cheat because they do not accept the definitions and boundaries of knowledge that the contemporary corporate-like institution create. A generation of students have come of age in a time of easy file sharing and cut-n-paste rhetoric. They see the traditional ideas of academic integrity as arbitrary and controlling—a form of discipline and punishment. One student noted that as college education has become more and more of a commodity—rather than a process or experience or some other word equally unfitting to what I mean at this moment—the stigma attached to cheating has lessened. Why should students feel bad about trying to pass or get ahead in a system that cares more for the final product than for the path one takes to it? In many ways our students are more in-tune with the changes in higher education than we teachers are. They see it for what it is: a thing to be had.

3. The DAJs have probably lost their effectiveness. I’ll know more after the Wed. survey, but I’m somewhat convinced that the students are racing to fill in the entries in the next two days—which of course defeats the purpose. It might be an interesting article to explore why this assignment didn’t catch on.

4. From the group on downloading: the RIAA is still into spectacle punishment because they are yet to establish authority with the general public. So they sue 12-year olds for millions in the hope they will scare me away from downloading a Tom Waits song. It works.

Comments?

Swamped in a panopticon

Man, I'm swamped--got back late on Sunday night, been packing all week, and trying to get a few things revised for submission.

The students are getting Foucault, and I'm looking forward to their group presentations, rescheduled for Monday.

Today's discussion included almost every student--even those who have admitted to not yet getting through the reading. For this I credit the other students, who have been raising the level of discussion to a point where others wish to join.

I'll post more specific stuff next week. Back to the boxes.

Of Posters and Progress

I’m getting ready to head to CCCC in Chicago (nothing like geriatric rock), and that means the class won’t be physically meeting till next week. Just enough time off for the students to finish Discipline & Punish (notes are never as good as the real thing).

Let me just say that the poster presentations really impressed me. I’m going to try to take some close-up photos to post. Perhaps I should have asked the students to say a few things about each of their works, but I was really happy with the products they put on display. Even students who have been struggling a bit with the course material pulled it together for this project.

And all this tells me a few things that support some of my general ideas about education. First off, students are interested in finding alternative forms for their intellectual work—and alternative audiences. They want to engage each other, and they realize that traditional academic forms don’t help that cause much. Second, connecting course materials to the kinds of texts students encounter all the time creates excellent space for inventiveness and creativity. And smarts. The annotations on the posters were thoughtful and full of voice. These students claimed this assignment in all the ways I hoped they would.

We need to continue to make education about ownership, about what it means to claim one’s own ideas and to thrust them out into the public sphere. Too much of what we do is private and safe. And I understand that we want college to be a place where students can learn without the threat of reprisal and public scorn. But I also understand that education needs to crackle with the nervous energy of engagement.

More soon from the Windy City…

Where's the Disciplining?

They (it’s always them) say that the key to successful blogging is consistency. Yeah.

Anyway, another busy week; this one spent prepping for CCCC in Chicago. Tomorrow the students are presenting their posters in one of the buildings on campus. I’m looking forward to seeing them—and to seeing some of the faculty’s reactions.

With the poster presentations, the focus on individual texts will end. The class will turn to issues of disciplinarity and genre. For example, in class on Wed. we looked at five letters to editors about the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. We talked a great deal about how those five authors defined the event and the government’s responsibilities. The letters help reproduce ideas about the relationships citizens have with their government and with each other. But we didn’t really get into that as much as we discussed how the letters reflected the individual authors’ ideas and political positions. When I get back from the conference, the focus of the class will become one step more abstract as we will begin to discuss how genres like editorials create discourse conventions that define what is normal and acceptable and what is not.

I expect that we’ll start talking a lot about how we as subjects are disciplined by the texts we encounter; how social control is exerted on us via discourses; and how we establish social hierarchies through texts. In short, we’ll be talking about Foucault.

I’m hoping to maintain the de-centered-ness of the class as we move into the heavy theory stuff, but I feel a strong responsibility to make sure the class is working their way through it in appropriate ways—whatever those might be.

Here Comes the Story of the Hurricane...

Been just swamped with work and personal stuff (like condo-buying) and so I haven’t written much about class. Today we talked for about half the time about some of the “urban legends” to come out of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Mostly we focused on these photos. The other half we talked about illegal immigration. It was, to me, a thoughtful conversation but it probably didn’t take us where we needed to go as a class. Not that I know exactly what I mean by that. Clearly, issues like immigration are rife with language/power stuff, but without a text we could all examine, the conversation quickly got into other areas. And I pontificated—mostly because I like having political discussion—but now I’m uneasy with the extent to which I talked. And I worry that my plea for responses seemed ham-handed at best. Who wants to respond to a teacher who just made a point that clearly addressed his political positions? Just nod and get out.

I give the class credit for putting up with it. And perhaps there was a time when I would have thought that a class like today’s was good or beneficial. I don’t think it was bad by any means, but the more productive conversations by far have been those where my concerns take a back seat to the texts we can all share.

So Wednesday it’s back to Katrina, specifically to editorials and letters that address how people perceived the actions of New Orleans residents and the federal and local governments. Katrina places us at an interesting nexus of rhetoric and reality. What happens when our leaders’ words don’t match with what we can see on the TV? And how do our political biases shape our responses to these events?

These are the kinds of issues we need to get more into. And we need to get into theory. And we will, what with Foucault and Fairclough and Lakoff all coming up. One issue I see coming is prepping the students for the challenges these authors will present—and to assist them in linking the authors’ ideas to their own. The DAJs will have to play a significant role in this—and that role will have to be documented. We might see more specific DAJ assignments in the weeks to come, which may be something of a relief to the students. In general, it's time for the class to move on to more complicated, challenging things.

DAJ Feedback Loop

Since the research project I’m doing focuses on the value/benefit of the Discourse Analysis Journal (DAJ) assignment, I want to spend some time thinking through some of the responses to yesterday’s in-class writing on the DAJ. I presented the students with the survey data and asked the groups to discuss what the numbers indicated to them. I then asked each student to write a paragraph response to each of three prompts:

1. How did you interpret the “neutral” choice on the survey?
2. How would you summarize your group’s discussion?
3. What are your reactions to the DAJ so far?

I’m ok thinking that the “neutral” was a methodological screw-up on the survey, and I agree with several of the students who claim it allowed for “cop-out” answers. I was really just trying to provide a continuum of responses and saw the jump from “somewhat agree” to “somewhat disagree” as too big.

The larger findings from the freewrites suggest several things:

1. Students are not seeing a significant connection between the journals and the rest of the course.
2. They want to see samples of good entries.
3. They want more direct feedback from me.

Some evidence for these findings:

“…the assignment is being completed but the big picture isn’t being brought into class.”
“I feel like it is the same thing over and over and still not a huge change for the better.”
“Yes, the students are trying to do the assignments with the fair understanding of what is expected and are reflecting on each piece as a separate piece of discourse but I believe we are not consciously/actively thinking about how this relates to the larger objectives of the course. We acknowledge its importance . . . but we haven’t figured out / done much to incorporate these very ‘private’ (‘journals’) assignments into the classroom discussion.”
“The DAJ at first was not so difficult but once I began learning other concepts, it seemed like I couldn’t keep up with all the new information. . . . I only interpret the bigger picture of the text and neglect to pinpoint the concepts discussed in class.”
“I feel that the DAJs should be assessed more on completion than anything else. This is an opportunity for the student to get his thoughts organized and coherent while trying to grasp terms. It would be more beneficial if instead of the professor taking time to give a point value to take time and write what is good/bad or ‘Did you think about x’?”
“I think in order for it to be a useful forum for testing/practicing concepts, it would be nice to get feedback more often.”

I think one of the first things I need to do is explain my lack of comments on the journals. It’s kind of two-fold: One, I got about 20 journals, each with up to 9 pages of entries. I read through them for trends and problems, but not with an eye toward commenting because I would have had them for way too long. And the kind of quick comments I could have written probably would have confused people more than not. The fact is that I liked most of what I saw in the journals. The lower grades came mostly for incompleteness. Two, part of me wanted to encourage students to come see me with questions and requests for comments. This is sort of my way of coaxing people into my office hours. If I gave comments toward improvement, some students might have taken them as the last word and then choose not to come talk with me. This may be a strategy that works well for some students while angering others. In class on Wednesday, I tried to make very clear that I am always available to talk about any aspect of the class. (It always surprises me the extent to which some students will sit in class frustrated and then choose not to talk to the teacher.) I very much respect the desire for feedback, especially when the work is time-consuming. So, I’ll figure out ways of getting more feedback to the students. I might rotate through the groups, so that only one group is without its journals for a give period. I might also ask them to trade journals for a night and respond to each other.

I don’t think everything done for class needs some overt connection to everything else, but clearly students will not engage an assignment fully if they don’t see its relevance (which is exactly the problem with many of the writing assignments floating around campuses). The thing is, discourse analysis is as much about habits of mind as is it about specific techniques and strategies—perhaps more so. One goal behind the DAJ is to encourage a continual analytical perspective on the world—it’s to push students to see every text or group of texts as rife with meanings and functions to analyze. I know it’s tiring some times, but it can also be thrilling. And I’m not trying to be corny.

So the challenge for the DAJ remains to make it more vital to the students’ experiences with the course and its assignments. Tomorrow I will suggest the feedback stuff above and will also suggest that students use their next few entries to draft the annotations for their poster projects.