In our October Teacher Talk, Drs. Crystal Benedicks and Jill Lamberton described their work with the Wabash Liberal Arts Immersion Program (WLAIP), a summer program which brings a group of entering Wabash freshmen to campus for four weeks during the summer, to get a head start on their Wabash experience. As part of the program, the students complete an immersive composition course, in which the final assignment, designed by Jill Lamberton, is a reflective audio essay.
The assignment was motivated by the observation that in the real world, our students will be writing in multi-modal ways, and Jill was interested in creating an assignment that helped students practice this type of writing. Students also had the opportunity to solidify their learning as they reflected on what they had learned in the course, stating what their beliefs about writing are, and the types of writers they wanted to be. The use of an audio assignment also leveled the playing field in some ways, as those students who excelled in creating audio content were not always those who had written the strongest papers. And, the assignment also involved peer evaluation, to give students more experience in looking critically at the work of others, and using that feedback to improve their own work.
In the Teacher Talk, we listened to a 9 minute audio piece, which featured parts of the audio essays of several of this year’s WLAIP students. The clip is available to Wabash faculty on the Teaching and Learning Canvas page (Look under the 2016-17 information, under the heading: Teacher Talk – What first-year students really think about college learning (Oct. 19, 2016)).
In the clip, we heard students describe being overwhelmed in school, “fact after fact smack me in the face without knowing what it meant.” Others described how they felt they had not understood the purpose of school, how it translated to being successful, and how they now wanted to claim an education. How they had felt that “creativity was a crime” in high school, and they were never expected to succeed in college, or treated as a person with potential. Students spoke about being self-conscious about their accent, feeling that they were judged as less able, and their words as less valuable, because of their speech. Others spoke about how they had dreaded reading in school, and had never really read a passage or essay before the summer course.
After listening to the audio, faculty and staff shared their reactions. We noted that it must be very different to come into college from backgrounds where they were not expected to go on to college, compared to those students who were always expected to go to college. We were also impressed that the students featured were all very eloquent and reflective, citing sources well.
We noted that students reported seeing the feedback on their writing (getting a paper back marked up in red) as a reflection of who they were (a bad writer) and not as feedback intended to help them improve their work. Related, students did not really think of drafting as a process of thinking, and this was something they had to learn.
Helen Hudson, who had also taught in the summer course, described her conversations with students, who said “I had no idea anyone was interested in hearing my ideas” when they reflected on class discussion.
Some of the points that we took away from the audio clip and our own conversation were:
- We can all promote students talking directly to each other.
- We can also promote the idea that you CAN work on your writing and improve as a writer.
- The importance of encouraging annotations – in the summer course, students were required to print and write all over their readings; students received points based on how much they wrote
- The importance of helping students understand strategies for annotations: to see this as a key part of engaging with a text.
- To encourage students to summarize, react, to ask questions in the margin
- To see this work as the ideas that will be important in their later paper drafts, and a key step in the writing process.