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Date:         Mon, 7 Sep 1992 13:48:42 -0400
From:         Lili Velez <lv08+%ANDREW.CMU.EDU@CARNEGIE.BITNET>
Subject:      Critical thinking and assigned tasks

Several things came to mind when reading Eric Crump's (Hi, Eric!)
comments on critical thinking, teachers claiming that students "aren't
ready to formulate good questions", and assigned writing topics.  Here
are some of them, in no particular order:

After working in the bio department for several years, what became
fairly apparent was not simply that the students weren't always
"expected" to formulate good [from a disciplinary standpoint] questions,
but that the discipline wasn't "ready" for them to be doing so.  One of
the strongest ethos-building devices in many disciplines is simply the
_amount of time_ spent within the community.  The levels you've climbed,
the experiences you've racked up.  You can have a head packed with
genuinely wonderful research ideas when you're a college junior or
senior, but it's not until you're a PhD student or a postdoc....or maybe
not even until you have your own lab...that you can _really_ ask those
questions, do the research, etc.  This isn't to say that college
instructors shouldn't point students _beyond_ what their disciplines
expect of them at any given time in their intellectual development, but
it seems a little smug of us in Rhet/Comp to assume that we know best
when students should be asking particular kinds of questions.


I'm now working with a set of 65 freshmen in the CMU Design program.  In
their first writing-to-learn journal assignment (for an art history
class, taught by a very eager WAC person who doesn't realize just how
ephemeral WAC _is_ at CMU), we asked them to write why they chose
Design, rather than Fine Arts as their major [We asked them not to
simply say "Because I thought I could make a _living_ being a graphic or
industrial designer..."].  And I was rather surprised to discover that
what most of these students wanted was boundaries.  Constraints.  They
claimed that they felt more creative when they had some avenues closed
to them.  They didn't feel comfortable with the "anything in any medium"
attitude they detected from Fine Arts.  These kids _wanted_ assignments!
 What are we supposed to do?  Tell them that they're just suffering from
the dominant ideology, and that they can be helped with twice weekly
applications of Theory?  [sorry, I'm running off at the keyboard
here....]  I certainly think that the art history teacher and I should
point out to them that one reason they might feel better about
assignments and constraints is that within tighter parameters, they have
a "better chance" at being "right", and note how our culture is
currently obssessed with setting limits (good people live within these
limits, and bad people not only want to ignore limits but knock them
down and invite others to do the same)....

I think I'd rather start the semester giving assignments and suggesting
topics (with a backdoor open for students who want to talk me into
letting them do something else); give them some base to stand on (or
react against; that's fine), and _then_ move out into more freeform
activities.

There are times when I think that we teachers fall in love with the
things we think students ought to be doing, to the point that we set
students up to do these things at the rate _we_ wish they would do them,
rather than at the rate they can best enter those activities... [am I
making sense there? it's sort of a restatement of Piaget's evaluation of
"the American question"]

Lili
"Rhet in the Blue Linen Labcoat"
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