On the first day of my undergraduate writing class, I begin by showing students several pieces of writing: an academic article, a newspaper editorial, and two essays taken from an exam guide for the type of standardized test that my students are accustomed to taking. We discuss how these pieces of writing relate to one another, how the academic article example and the exam essays each adopt a tripartite structure, or how the editorial uses some familiar introductory moves in its opening paragraphs. But we also talk about how the professional pieces of writing adapt these common structures to their purposes, and I draw attention to what I think is the signal difference between an exam essay and a “real” piece of writing. The problem isn’t that an exam essay is “formulaic,” as my students often assume. Formulas can be useful. The problem is that an exam essay isn’t for anyone. It is an exercise designed to be completed in a discrete period of time within the four walls of an exam room. It makes no reference to any arguments happening outside of it, and it aims not to persuade or inform the reader but to demonstrate a grasp of basic paragraph and sentence structures and competence in the target language. In the real examples we can identify rhetorical moves that signal what motivated the writer to write and who the ostensible audience is, what preconceptions and opposing opinions the author feels the need to address. This, I argue, is why we are interested in sitting down to read the academic article and the editorial and while we would likely never take up an exam essay for leisure reading. “Real” writing is engaged with the world.
The point of the class, I emphasize, is not to immediately transform them from writers of exam essays to editorialists. Rather, the purpose is to move them gradually in that direction. The first step in producing truly engaged writing is to figure out what other people are saying, following the basic principles of Birkenstein and Graff’s They Say, I Say. Therefore, the first unit is focused on gathering and evaluating sources, leading to the production of a proposal and literature review that describes a project the student will complete over the course of the semester and a range of perspectives on that topic.
There is a particular focus during this unit on information literacy and the evaluation of sources. I find that most young people these days are comfortable with the idea that knowledge is situated and that virtually everything has a bias. This is especially the case in Russia, where the dominant problem isn’t so much credulity in the face of government propaganda but cynicism, the assumption that everything is equally biased, and the truth simply cannot be known. This inevitably produces a tendency to default to sources of information most supportive of their existing worldview and to embrace epistemic closure, a problem that is abetted by social media algorithms that allow us to customize our own propaganda environments. One way that I address this problem in class is with activities that require students to evaluate sources that I choose (ranging in quality from solid to garbage) and make a case to the rest of the class as to why we should find them credible or not. Assignments such as these instill the key skills of searching across and not only within a particular media source, checking Wikipedia and other reference sources to find out who publishes and funds a website rather than trying to judge whether it seems credible based on the quality of the web design or the kinds of articles it publishes. It also accustoms them to testing their assumptions in the presence of feedback from others, since the purpose of the assignment isn’t simply to arrive at their own conclusion but to explain their reasoning to their peers and respond to challenges. The semester then moves on to assignments that train the skills of rhetorical analysis and argument construction, using concepts like Toulmin theory to get students to think about how an argument is put together and where the weak points may lie.
In previous years, the capstone project for this class has taken the form of an extended argumentative essay and presentation that showcase the expertise the students have built in this topic over the course of the term. However, during the pandemic, when I was facing the dismal prospect of having twenty students give Power Point-based presentations over Zoom, the case for multi-modal approaches seemed more urgent than ever. Therefore, I’ve transformed the final project for this class into a video assignment. Students write a script for the video which is then revised based on my feedback and recorded in a format chosen by the student, whether that means speaking in front of a camera or using a platform that allows them to create their own animation. In future iterations, I plan to spend more time teaching some basic skills in video editing to help make these projects a bit more polished.
As the aforementioned video project should indicate, my writing pedagogy is process-oriented. Assignments in my courses are scaffolded so that projects develop in stages over the course of several assignments. Major essays are peer reviewed and then submitted to me for feedback, which is designed to guide them through the revisions that will help them produce a stronger final draft. This approach also helps discourage academic dishonesty, which is a major issue facing my program in Russia. Not only does breaking down assignments into components and drafts make cheating more difficult, but the conversation that develops between the student and I over the course of the project is aimed at increasing good faith and mutual regard with the ultimate goal of encouraging the student to respect the process and view it as something that will be useful for her in life.
In all, while the concept of liberal education is both new and contested where I work, my approach is still oriented toward the end of cultivating a democratic subjectivity and the skills necessary to participate in an open public sphere, and I am happy to say that in my classroom, students have consistently felt free to write and talk about “forbidden” topics like the rights of the LGBT community in Russia, discrimination against immigrants, gender politics, and the ever-important question of how a monolithic Russian state can become more open and democratic. This unique experience of having facilitated such conversations on openly hostile territory will, I think, bring something new and important to future teaching experiences in my home country.