Harris opens his chapter with an anecdote about a successful small-group workshop he held at a coffee shop. He retells the procedures of the workshop and how it led a specific student to revise her paper. He then moves to issues of logistics, noting that workshops, since they work best in small groups with a teacher as a facilitator/moderator, could distract from the whole class identity and purpose.
He reviews the posed solutions of others with respectful disdain, and begins to explore how we as teachers "can talk about student texts in class in ways that are of direct use to everyone in the room."
In trying to maintain beneficial writing workshops and whole-class productivity, Harris turns to a writing seminar model.
- "In a seminar, a teacher leads a conversation about a text written by one of the students in the room. But the point of this talk is less to offer the writer advice for revision than to frame a lesson on writing for everyone in the class...The questions that drives a seminar is "What can we learn as writers from this text?"
Multitext Seminar
In this form of the writing seminar, Harris selects a few student texts that struggle with the same issue or falter when trying to make the same moves. He then uses these as a platform for classroom discussion. The selections also exhibit "a problem in writing that many or most of the students in the class are confronting right then." These excerpts offer multiple solutions from a range of responses.
He then asks students to take out their drafts and make some notes about how they could revise their responses to incorporate the moves they discussed during the seminar. Harris writes that such classes "direct students back to their own work in progress." His seminars pose questions about "how to make particular pieces stronger, they are questions that anyone trying to write intellectual prose needs to think about--and thus that a group of writers can talk about usefully together."
Single-Text Seminar
Focuses on a single, teacher-selected text that raises "an issue in writing that everyone in the room can apply to their own work in progress."
"The job of the teacher in a single-text seminar is to identify moments in an essay that can lead to more thinking and writing."
The seminar allowed Harris to "point to the need for them all not merely to correct their prose but to develop their ideas."
Both/And
Harris argues that composition classrooms can benefit greatly from utilizing both the workshop and seminar formats. He believes "that good seminars help set up good workshops."
"The workshop and seminar do different things. As writing teachers, we need to do both. The focus of a workshop is on the individual writer...The seminar, though, is more of a metaspace. Its aim is to help the readers of a text understand something new about the craft of writing."
Harris notes that many teachers resist workshop formats because the "field tends to link teaching formats to intellectual and ideological positions." Essentially, workshops are seen as intellectually inferior forms of instruction.
Questions:
How would Harris' format work outside of Duke? His examples of student comments and participation seem borderline unrealistic for less prestigious institutions. Then again, the method could be adopted with less dense texts as a basis for classroom discussion.
Should we use student-generated texts as whole class examples?
A
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