Another composition question

February 18, 2009 11:34 AM

Help me come up with better models!! (re: essays and argumentation)

I have a roomful of freshman comp students, and I'm trying to teach them how to "put texts together" -- specifically, critical texts taking up specific real-world issues (right now, it's academic freedom in the classroom). They get how to move from global to specific -- giving a sense of the argument as a whole, and then choosing ONE thing they want to talk about. This is fine. What I'm having a problem with is getting them beyond the compare / contrast structure, and toward, you know, actual arguments. This is basically how they go right now:

"X and Y say it's important to look at multiculturalism in the classroom in these ways. When we look at what they say, we learn that it's really important to look at multiculturalism in the classroom."

I'm trying to give them different models for structuring their papers, but I'm having a hard time brainstorming useful examples (also really tripping up on the metaphor of "conversation") This is what I have on scratch paper.

Example 1: Description
“X is true” (X being your thesis, loosely cribbed from Critic 1, for why diversity in the classroom is a good thing) “This is why X is true (Critic 1's argument)” "This is how X differs from Y" (Critic 2's argument) → a "proof" that's actually a summary, where you’re not actually being asked to make any kind of independent claim

Example 2: Point / counterpoint
“If X is true” (X being whatever argument Critic 1 makes about academic freedom in the classroom) “this is what we learn by comparing it to Y” (Y being what Critic 2 has to say about it) → a slightly nuanced version of Example 1, but where the point is to contextualize, rather than compare -- works well when the critics supposedly "agree" with one another (letting them tease out differences) -- not so well when the critics obviously disagree

Example 3: Doing a close reading
“Critic 1 says Z about academic freedom in the university” (Z being a specific claim or argument IN THE TEXT). “This is how Critic 2 interpets X’s statement – or similar statements.” (again, looking at a similar bit of text “This is what I have to say about the difference” → also a compare / contrast, but focusing on tone, word choice, stylistic differences --> lets them work mainly with block quotes, gets you away from broad "gist" generalizations

You see the problem. Maybe this is making it too complicated? What I told them that DOES seem to make sense is really simple: "What do we learn from reading your paper that we don't just learn from reading the essays?" But I think that just made them concerned.

Help? I KNOW there are people on this site who are better at this than I am. Put your pedagogical caps on, and help fix my examples!

posted by puckish to education (7 comments total)

"X and Y say it's important to look at multiculturalism in the classroom in these ways. When we look at what they say, we learn that it's really important to look at multiculturalism in the classroom."

This passage contains an informal fallacy. What your students need is familiarity with a) informal fallacies, so they can avoid them; b) valid deductive arguments, so they can construct them; c) invalid deductive arguments, so they can recognize and avoid them; d) strong inductive arguments, so they can construct their own; and e) weak inductive arguments, so they can etc. etc.

If that's outside the scope of your class, at least explain the relationship between the premises and the conclusion in deductive and inductive arguments.
posted by bricoleur at 12:41 PM on February 18 [1 favorite]

I'm not a teacher of any ilk, so feel free to ignore, but:

It occurs to me that an element of extrapolation is missing from the models as you describe them. More interesting observations can sometimes come from something like "A says B and B logically, necessarily implies C. Look at what D says and how it relates to C."

Also, I wonder if phrasing of the examples as you have them might constrict their thinking to just about 2 texts in comparison with each other when oftentimes part of pulling together an interesting argument is in doing the research to get a whole mess of sources that talk about the same thing.
posted by juv3nal at 1:02 PM on February 18

"What do we learn from reading your paper that we don't just learn from reading the essays?"

Without drawing on a wide variety of other sources, or resorting to decades of life experience as a fully actualized adult, this probably will be a difficult goal to achieve.

One way of engaging with a critical argument is to realize that the process of argument is one of making distinctions. If you can spot a point where an author has glazed over a critical detail, that allows an opportunity for expansion of an idea into a whole new direction.

I remember back around 2000 reading a columnist in my college paper who flatly stated "Cutting taxes helps the economy." He was a conservative Rush Lim-bot, and his "arguments" consisted of tossing out canned statements that would take pages to unpack and qualify. No facts, no figures, no arguments to rebut. Only empty one-liners.

I think many people would kind of get the gist of what he was saying, and in a very general unspecific unexamined way, it could sort of be accepted as true with the appropriate qualifications. But there was no attempt to think, or more specifically, furnish those qualifications.

With this example, some of the questions that come to mind are:

Why do tax cuts help the economy?
Does it make a difference whether the tax cuts are spent or saved?
Who gets the tax cuts?
Will the tax cuts be financed by reductions in spending? Or deficits?
What are the downsides of reduced spending/running deficits?
What is the measure of whether the economy has been helped?
To what degree have tax cuts helped the economy in the past?
How much new investment will be realized from the tax cuts?
Are there any figures that could support or refute any of these arguments?

The lesson here is that if there is an opportunity to make a distinction that would change the argument

I can also recommend a web site which publishes both examples of student writing, and articles on how to teach student writing.

http://uwp.duke.edu/publications/
posted by Maxwell_Smart at 3:11 PM on February 18

Take a look at They Say, I Say by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein(-Graff). The book is all about providing templates (models at the single-sentence scale: things like "Though I concede that ___, I still insist that ___." [60]) for different ways of handling sources and others' positions while still staking out one's own. I wouldn't use it as a primary text for a writing class myself, but as a supplement and a guide on this specific question it should be very helpful in generating more models/examples for your students.
posted by RogerB at 5:56 PM on February 18

"X and Y say it's important to look at multiculturalism in the classroom in these ways. When we look at what they say, we learn that it's really important to look at multiculturalism in the classroom."

Yeah, I was going to mention (as bricoleur did) that this isn't much of an argument, as it essentially says "A is true, therefore A is true."

The problem I have with the examples you've given is that they don't really demonstrate argumentation so much as they demonstrate assertions (and I think you mentioned this problem when you said it was a summary). You've got a thesis statement, X, you support X with points from critics A and B, and you conclude.

An argument, to me, necessitates analysis, and I'm not seeing a lot of that from your template. The easiest way to do analysis is through what's known as the "why-well". You go deeper and deeper into the well (your argument) until you've exhausted all the "whys".

So for example:
Diversity in the classroom is good.
Why? Because critic A says so with facts 1, 2, and 3.
Why do those facts apply to my argument? Because fact 1 demonstrates the positive correlation of [blah] on student performance.
Why is [blah] good? Because it helps them in their careers with [this].
Why does that matter? Because University is meant to help students prep for their careers.

So then you've got a line of reasoning that basically says: Diversity in the classroom is good. This can be seen through facts 1, 2, and 3 which critic A mentioned in "source". Since fact 1 has been shown to have a positive correlation with [blah], and [blah] is imperative to students who want to improve their chances at [this], it logically follows that diversity in the classroom is beneficial to students in the long term for their career goals. Therefore it is good.

This is obviously rather ad-hoc, but I hope you get what I mean.
posted by Phire at 6:03 AM on February 19

Seconding They Say, I Say.
posted by Bardolph at 8:22 AM on February 19

That's true, phire -- my thought, in giving them these examples, was more to offer a couple of different models for how to put their claims or arguments in line with what they've read (to imagine positioning themselves, with regard to the critics, in a way that lets them pick out these more specific claims). But yeah, the examples themselves are mostly descriptive, and looking back, more than a little confusing.

What I *should* actually be doing is going through arguments and logical fallacies, and using class examples to model these (what bricoleur said). We've been working on specifying the question a lot in class, but this tends to get lost in the papers because they feel like they have to cover the *whole thing* in one go. (this is why the question addressed global structure, rather than specific claims). But it's probably much easier to go the incremental approach -- it's easier to see, and it gets them working immediately with the texts, which is really the bigger issue here.

Anyway, thanks for the advice everyone -- I really appreciate it!
posted by puckish at 9:44 PM on February 19