Maggie Debelius--What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Workshops

Teaching with Student Texts. Joseph Harris, John Miles and Charles Paine, Eds. Logan: Utah State UP; 2010.

Debelius writes as a response to recent publications calling the value of workshops into question.

The Workshop and Its Discontents
We like to workshop in class because it emulates the values we want to imbue: audience, revision, writing process.

Critics of workshops compare the workshopping process to sadism and the blind leading the blind. Students don't know how to give feedback. In addition, many say that workshops promote conformity.

Debelius then responds to these criticisms, describing how she uses workshops in her classroom. Her workshops:

• focus on one piece of writing
• generates feedback
• spend the first month learning how to effectively workshop
• teach students "the moves that matter in writing workshops."
• always occur on a Friday
• writer initiated--the writer asks the readers for specific kinds of feedback

Week One

• Debelius meets with each student one-on-one in the first week to teach them where her office is and learn what matters to the student.
• She also discusses a one-paragraph piece of writing with the student.

Week Two: The Listening Workshop

•  The purpose is to "encourage students to take risks...[and] help students confront anxiety about sharing their work.
• Students bring in a personal essay and students respond by listening, smiling, nodding, and asking for clarification. No intense criticism is allowed. 
• Students then write a reflection about how it felt sharing their work.

Week Three: Modeling Effective Response

• This workshop builds off of an assigned summary.
• The students often have a difficult time going from the listening workshop to the summary workshop.
• The students might have "an inadequate understanding of the argument they're summarizing, a misunderstanding of the assignment itself, or reluctance to criticize a peer."
• Her solution is to schedule the workshop in the writing center.

Week Four: The Research Workshop

• To combat the assumption that workshops are normative and quash creativity and tend not to focus on developing ideas, Debelius conducts a research workshop.
• The students bring in a list of sources used by an author. 
• The students then gather in small groups and work on computers to evaluate the sources.
• The students were able to delve into the memberships of cited sources and uncovered some faulty data.
• The goal is to join the research and writing processes, and because the format is a short list, students are more likely to pose ideas and discuss rather than clam up because they don't want to comment on someone's writing. 
• "This gives us a chance to talk meaningfully about the difference between scholarly and popular sources and to consider how the use and presentation of their source material builds credibility."

Week Five: The Expert Workshop (Or Acquiring A New Perspective)

• This week focuses on rebutting the premise that workshops don't "cast issues in a fresh light"--Mark Edmundson. 
• Debelius has her students write drafts on essays that assert college students are coddled and pampered. Her students share their responses via an online discussion board/learning platform. The students then visit a professional in the subject matter of their drafts, which "gives students the confidence, vocabulary, and evidence to take on an expert." Essentially, the students are able to use their drafts as a platform for engaging in a higher-level discussion with an expert on an issue, which then could lead to fresh ideas instead of a restating of what is already known.  

Workshops continue throughout the semester, but since Debelius has guided her students in the first five weeks in proper workshop practices, she believes the workshops can better avoid the pitfalls of non-productive workshops.

"The final element is to allow adequate time for students to reflect on which assignments and workshops they find most and least successful...By varying and asking students to reflect on the workshop form, effective peer response becomes a course outcome rather than just a pedagogical tool in the service of writing."
A 

Joseph Harris--"Workshop and Seminar"

Teaching with Student Texts, Harris, Miles, and Paine (Eds) Logan,; Utah State UP, 2010.

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?" 

 Harris' seminars take one of two different forms.

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