As I do every single semester, I rewrote my syllabus from scratch this time around. I changed up my methods of evaluation to be more writing focused, while at the same time being less reliant on the notion that my students are already strong college-level writers.
I have an introductory unit and six major units of study in my HIST 1301 course, from the First Peoples of North America to the Civil War/Reconstruction Era. Each unit takes two weeks, and each unit includes a primary source analysis of some kind. However, I constructed those assignments to teach the basic skills of writing an evidence-based analytic paper that makes a sound case for a clearly-defined claim.
The first source analysis assignment consisted of a single paragraph. I had students read the Native story “How the Cayuse Got Fire,” from Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Country, edited by Jarold Ramsey. Then I had them write a single paragraph, and I gave them the thesis: A careful examination of the Cayuse story shows that, along with many other Native American groups, they believed in ______. (I drew upon Michael Leroy Oberg’s Native America: A History to highlight those common themes in the lecture accompanying this unit, and gave my students the choice of which Native belief to look for in the story.)
But I did more than give my students a thesis; I gave them a script, somewhat along the lines of the formulae found in They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. I assumed they had zero knowledge of how to structure a paragraph, so I laid out a blueprint for them and told them that they were welcome to follow my framing word for word, line for line, move for move.
Here’s the (somewhat revised) framework I developed for this single paragraph assignment:
Your paragraph should do the following:
1. Begin with the thesis sentence, identifying the key belief you will be discussing in the paragraph.
2. In the second sentence, describe a detail from the story that will support your statement. You could structure your sentence thus: “For example, the story mentions ________.”
3. Follow that example up with THREE sentences that explain HOW that particular detail helps prove your statement. You could structure your sentences like this: “This detail from the story involves / suggests / refers to ____________. This reference to ____________ connects to Native American beliefs about __________. Native Americans believed that ________________.”
4. In the sixth sentence, select a second detail from the story that will support your opening statement.
5. Follow that example up with THREE sentences that explain HOW that particular detail helps prove your statement.
6. In the concluding / 10th sentence of your paragraph, state something along these lines: “Taken together, these details from ‘How the Cayuse Got Fire’ illustrate Native Americans’ belief in ____________”
If that seems overly prescriptive, or overly structured, or condescending, or suggests a lack of faith in students’ writing abilities, I would like to assure you that it is not any of those things. I have great faith in students’ writing abilities when they have been fortunate enough to attend schools that can devote the time and energy and talent needed to teach the basic skills of analytic writing. But since I teach at a community college, where students come with highly varied levels of preparation, I have decided that the best way to help my students meet the objectives of the course—analyze primary and secondary sources, make sound historical arguments using primary and secondary sources, etc.—I should assume, for pedagogy’s sake, that they have never been taught the first thing about how to write.
So the first assignment was pretty straightforward. The next assignment was longer and more complicated, and asked for a slightly different set of skills: the first paragraph was to summarize the argument of one secondary source, while the second paragraph was to evaluate how that argument agreed with or diverged from the interpretation offered in a different secondary source.
As before, I gave the students a highly scripted, highly structured scaffolding to build upon. I told them that they were not required to use the structure I had suggested, but I encouraged them to do so if they felt they needed help getting the information and ideas on the page in a way that would seem clear to other readers.
And so we have gone, through the semester, with the writing assignments getting longer, asking for more rhetorical “moves”—consider counter-evidence, revise your claim to address valid counter-arguments, and so forth.
While the scaffolding I provided has been specific to each assignment, on the most recent writing assignment I provided no scaffolding at all. I had them read Angelina Grimké’s “Appeal to the Women of the South,” and I asked them to draw upon that letter, the lectures, and the American Yawp textbook to respond to the following prompt: Explain how Angelina Grimké’s letter both reinforces and challenges widely-held beliefs and social expectations about appropriate roles for women in the 1830s.
Of course I got questions: how long should it be? how many paragraphs should it be? how many sentences for each paragraph would be enough?
And I gentle pushed these fledgling history writers to the edge of the nest and told them, “Write as much as you need to, with as much detail and supporting evidence that you feel is necessary, in order to adequately address the problem I’ve posed.”
Never a popular answer, but often a pedagogically sound one.
As I graded these papers, I saw that several students in each class, without being directed to do so, had structured their papers along the lines of one of the previous assignments. Some even chose the path of deciding whether the rhetoric of Grimke’s letter was overall more traditional or more radical in its presentation of women’s roles, and they structured their essays using one (or more!) of the scaffolds I had provided to them in previous assignments.
That was the best feeling as a teacher. The best.
To sum up all the various “scaffolds” I have built for my students and synthesize them into a single process, I developed a resource for my students, “How to Write an Analytic Paper.” I have made that resource available free on Medium, and you can read it and share it with your own students via this non-paywalled link: Keys to Writing an Analytic Paper.
I still have one more set of papers to grade from each class—I’m teaching an overload of six courses this semester, so it’s a lot!. Still, trying to meet the course objectives / subject matter mastery goals via the back gate—teaching this course as a writing class whose subject is history, rather than a history class whose method of evaluation is writing—has been a nice change of pace for me. I am doing my best to give my students the keys to the kingdom, if they will but take them up and use them.
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