Breaking the Rules of Discussion - okcir.com IX 3/Egle Navarre Nixon.pdf1 h uman a rchitecture: j ournal of the s ociology of s elf-k nowledge, ix, 3, s ummer 2011, 1-14 i ntroduction:

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In this essay, we explore how, when,and why teachers might want to purposelysubvert conventional wisdom concerningeffective discussion-based teaching. Reflec-tive teachers embrace the student-centeredclassroom and the shared knowledge it

creates. We can safely say that most teach-ers value the discussion-based classroom—and value the larger pedagogical goals ofan open exchange of ideas and a sharedcreation of knowledge that are enacted bydiscussion. We want to question, however,the practices that are used to achieve mean-ingful class discussion. As we engage inthat questioning, we’d like to introduce the

LaMont Egle is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the English Department at UMass Boston. He has taught courses rang-ing from composition to the introduction to literary studies to advanced special topics in Victorian literature. His disser-tation, Plotting Friendship: Male Bonds in Early Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, examines the prevalence of popularnovels published during the first decades of the 1800s in which protagonists prioritized male friendship and all-malecommunity over marriage. It argues that these works were part of an anti-marriage literary tradition that dominated themarket and made available contravening ways of thinking about desire and self. His other research interests include therise of illustration in novels and the histories of gender and sexuality. Evelyn Navarre is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowin the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She earned her doctoral degree in American Stud-ies from SUNY Buffalo in 2010, with concentrations in nineteenth-century literature, culture, and history, women’s stud-ies, and multi-ethnic literature of early America. A seasoned teacher in higher education, she has developed and taughtcourses in American literature, American studies, and women’s studies. She is developing her dissertation, In Labor HerBest Teacher: Nineteenth Century Women’s Work as a Transcendentalist Bildungsroman, into a book about women’s writings asrecords of nineteenth-century experiential learning. Cheryl Nixon is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Directorin the English Department at UMass Boston. She teaches a course on the “Teaching of Literature” and helps to trainteaching assistants to work in the UMass Boston classroom. In partnership with the Boston Public Library, she has devel-oped a book club program that connects underserved pre-teens to graduate student mentors; it features lively discussionthat makes literary reading a social, shared experience. Her publications include The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Lawand Literature: Estate, Blood, and Body and Novel Definitions: An Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688-1815.

Breaking the Rules of Discussion Examples of Rethinking the Student-Centered Classroom

LaMont Egle, Evelyn Navarre, and Cheryl Nixon

University of Massachusetts Boston––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

[email protected] • [email protected] • [email protected]

Abstract: This essay explores teaching techniques that seem to go against discussion-based pedagogy butultimately achieve what we believe to be more productive forms of student discussion. Egle, Navarre, andNixon describe how experimenting with new models of discussion has led them to define discussion as sto-rytelling, as craft, and as idea-invention. Navarre explains how and why she uses storytelling to encouragemultiple levels of engagement with texts, using interspersed narrative that aims to “people” the classroomwith authors. Egle explains his commitment to discussion as a form of craft, examining how taking topics“off the table” and limiting the direction of student work helps promote fuller conversations. Affirming dis-cussion as a form of idea-invention, Nixon wants students to take responsibility for that process of inventionand explains using evaluated discussion and pre-structured discussion. This essay describes specific discus-sion-generating techniques in order to explore how we hope to unsettle the classroom in productive waysand, in doing so, to unsettle some of our “usual” ways of thinking about discussion.

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ISSN: 1540-5699. © Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press) and authors. All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Journal of the Sociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

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techniques we are currently experimentingwith and implementing in our classroomsas we explore how best to generate discus-sion; these techniques enact ideas thataren’t usually associated with discussion—ideas such as “emphasizing authors,”“using storytelling riffs,” “creating disrup-tions,” “taking topics off the table,” “givingdiscussion quizzes” and “reviewing pre-fabricated discussion.”

We posit that the best discussions willwork to “level” the differences in the class-room, put all students in the same positionof being knowledge-makers, and thusempower all students to feel comfortablespeaking. In addition, we would like toposit that, sometimes, in order to achievethis empowerment, students must beconfronted with unexpected discussion-generating techniques—techniques thatcreate equality because they disruptpredictable discussion dynamics. At a placelike UMass Boston, and especially in theEnglish department where we teach, manystudents do experience the discussion-based classroom—and discussion can thusbecome a mode that becomes quitecomfortable for some and remains uncom-fortable for others. We’ve all had classes inwhich we ask what we think to be an excel-lent question, only to have the same fewvoices respond and the same quiet studentsremain quiet. Our attempts at open-endedconversation can, paradoxically, reaffirmclassroom patterns that limit the type ofconversation we seek to foster. We are inter-ested in exploring discussion-generatingtechniques that disrupt the inequities thatsometimes become part of and are evencreated by the discussion-based classroom;we want to disrupt those inequities in anattempt to locate new forms of equity thatdiscussion could, and ideally alwaysshould, create.

Like most teachers, we have tried, withvarying degrees of success, well-knowntypes of discussion-generating techniques.These techniques can include everything

from using small groups to generateconversation to calling on students byname for a discussion response. Pedagogystudies that explore the qualities of effec-tive teaching often emphasize effectivediscussion, categorize forms of discussion,and then offer illustrative examples ofactivities that promote such discussion.

For example, Linda B. Nilson’s

Teachingat Its Best: A Research-Based Resource forCollege Instructors

explores strategies of“improving participation through skillfuldiscussion management” and emphasizestechniques such as “presenting a roadmap,” “igniting the exchange,” “respond-ing to student responses,” and “directingtraffic” (109-112). For each strategy, Nilsonoffers general examples of classroom activ-ities; for example, under “encouragingnon-participants,” she suggests directingquestions to silent parts of the room, usingicebreakers such as reading aloud, andasking non-participants to come to an officemeeting for assistance (110-111). Similarly,in

What the Best College Teachers Do

, KenBain emphasizes the importance of discus-sion as a means of teaching students to“think and learn how to engage in anexchange of ideas” (126). He overviewsdiscussion techniques by describing modelteachers who create heterogeneous groups(128), pose questions and allow students tocollect thoughts and then share ideas (oftenreferred to as “think-pair-share”) (130), andcall directly on students for responses (131).In this essay, we engage in these same prac-tices of categorizing and illustrating discus-sion, but do so in order to re-thinkdiscussion pedagogy.

Stephen D. Brookfield and StephenPreskill’s

Discussion as a Way of Teaching:Tools and Techniques for Democratic Class-rooms

offers more specific explanations ofnumerous strategies for starting andsustaining discussion. In a chapter titled,“Getting Discussion Started” they reviewthe benefits of having students sit in acircle, which they call “discussion in the

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round,” and the multiple ways of using thecircle to engage students in tasks such asactive listening and sequential speaking(77-79). In their “Keeping DiscussionGoing” chapter, they explore techniquesthat the instructor can use to ask effectivequestions and offer generative responses(85-99). Brookfield and Preskill also over-view more carefully structured discussionformats, such as “small group stations” (inwhich student groups rotate through aseries of pre-created stations, recordingcomments at each station) and the “jigsaw”(in which students break up into groups,become experts in a topic, redistribute intonew groups, and teach those new groupsabout their topic) (107-111).

Discussion as a Way of Teaching

articu-lates the goals we hope such techniqueswould achieve: “Although there are manyways to learn, discussion is a particularlywonderful way to explore supposedlysettled questions and to develop a fullerappreciation for the multiplicity of humanexperience and knowledge. To see a topiccome alive as diverse and complex viewsmultiply is one of the most powerful expe-riences we can have a learners and teach-ers” (3). They continue, “In revealing andcelebrating the multiplicity of perspectivespossible, discussion at its best exemplifiesthe democratic process. All participants in ademocratic discussion have the opportu-nity to voice a strongly felt view” (3). Ofcourse, we agree with these goals of multi-plicity, diversity, complexity, opportunity,and democratic process. But, what happenswhen techniques such as sitting yourstudents in a circle and asking good ques-tions don’t quite work for your class—orsimply start to seem stale and obvious?

We’d like to offer a series of ideas thatattempt to “turn inside out” the techniquesusually associated with discussion-basedpedagogy. These ideas aim to achieve amore radical version of discussion-basedpedagogy by engaging in practices thatseem to go against it. In the three sections

that follow, we explore our attempts todefine the less typical ways in whichdiscussion works in our classrooms: asstorytelling, as craft, and as idea-invention.In each section, we define and offer specificexamples of teaching techniques that seemto go against discussion-based pedagogybut work to support our own pedagogiesand achieve what we believe to be moresuccessful discussions.

In the spirit of discussion practices,each of us has explained our discussiontechniques in a section that preserves ourown voice, background, and experiences.In the first section, Evelyn explains howand why she uses

storytelling

to encouragemultiple levels of engagement with texts.Evelyn explores the use of “interspersed”narrative that aims to “people” the class-room with authors, offering students multi-ple ways to connect to those authors andthus feel more comfortable voicingresponses to and questions about thoseauthors. In the second section, LaMontexplains his commitment to discussion as aform of

craft

that can be seen as equivalentto the crafts of reading and writing. Hedescribes taking discussion topics “off thetable,” examining how limiting the direc-tion of student work actually helpspromote fuller conversations. In the thirdsection, Cheryl affirms discussion as a formof

idea-invention

, but questions how tomake students take fuller responsibility forthat process of invention. She explores theuse of discussion within a large lecture andhow the obstacles large lectures placed ondiscussion led to unexpected discussiontechniques such as “discussion quizzes”and “pre-fabricated discussion.”

Ultimately, we argue that a truly radi-cal classroom can use teaching techniquesthat seem, at first glance, to counter thegoals of discussion. However, we believethat these techniques work to ultimatelyachieve a deeper or richer form of multi-plicity, diversity, complexity, opportunity,and democratic process than some of the

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usual discussion techniques we have used.We hope to unsettle the classroom inproductive ways and, in doing so, to unset-tle some of our “usual” ways of thinkingabout discussion.

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Evelyn Navarre

Drawing from a rich tradition of indig-enous literature, I explore how an instruc-tor’s storytelling can function as apedagogical practice that challenges theconventional wisdom about student-centered discussion in the classroom. Byoffering anecdotes about Henry Thoreau,and emphasizing the voices of suchcultural “elders” in the American literatureclassroom, storytelling brings into theclassroom the notion that many voices cancome from and define the same person;storytelling thus encourages students todevelop their own voices as they respondto, question, and interact with theseauthors. This method can help generateclass discussions about strategies for enter-ing into material that often seems murkyand contradictory. Storytelling also gener-ates, for the teacher, fruitful questionsabout what we owe the past, and how thoseobligations might contrast or complementthe desire to bring students forward in thepresent.

I favor a very improvisational teachingstyle, but I was surprised when storytellingbegan to thread through my interactionswith students in the classroom. It seemedcounter-intuitive to all the rest of the meth-ods I use, which place students’ interac-tions with material, not me, at the center ofclass-time. Whether through breakoutgroups, projects, performances, or presen-tations, students in my classroom have ahands-on and highly interactive experience

with texts. Thus when I found myself doingmore storytelling, not just at the end of classto wrap things up, but also interspersedwith classroom activity, I felt that I wastaking up a little more airtime than normal.

Yet, these stories, anecdotes, and asidesbecame more necessary as I began to teachTranscendentalism. Transcendentalismwas a soupy, hard-to-pin down set of ideal-isms, aphorisms, and long-winding circu-lar philosophies expressed by a diverse,highly idiosyncratic crew of misfits andmalcontents in the early nineteenth cen-tury. The writings of the “Concord Group,”as they are often called, vex even contem-porary scholars regarding basic definitionsand rhetorical consistence. I decided to al-low for a big, soupy range of responses,and then just keep bringing students backinto the texts. Students in my sophomore-level classes seemed determined to find the“definitive” statement of Transcendental-ism from Thoreau, Emerson, and Fuller, de-spite the writers’ adamant embrace of con-tradiction. Students sometimes found thelong-windedness of Emerson and Fuller tobe pretentious, and the contradictory na-ture of all the authors’ writings to be evi-dence of hypocrisy. They also respondedagainst the didactic tone of many of Emer-son’s essays, and particularly of Thoreau’sdictates.

“’Simplify, simplify?’ But I don’twanna give up Facebooking, or my Ipod, andwho is this guy to tell anyone else how tolive?!’”

It reminded me just how differently

tuned is the twenty-first century ear, andjust how hints of anyone “telling themwhat to do with their lives” would grate onthe students’ sensibilities. So I started withanalogy:

Look, I said, the Transcendentalistcommitment is to following each line of think-ing not according to its linearity and sense, butrather for what that line of thinking evokes inone’s imagination. Think of it like jazz: there’s aband, and some one takes off on a riff, andfollows that out, then circles back to the maintheme.

The definitive “answer” became a

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definitive question we asked of each “riff”from the writers—what had it given us interms of experience or insight?

Like in music, other threads began toemerge in my teaching. Little analogies, theassociative thinking which the Transcen-dentalists favored, helped bridge the gapsbetween the abstract idealismspropounded by the writings and concreteapplications in “real life.” Little analogiesgrew into little stories as I drew from thejournals and letters of Thoreau and Emer-son, and augmented Fuller’s

Woman in theNineteenth Century

with her later journal-ism. I also used stories to break up mythsabout the Transcendentalists: no, Thoreaudidn’t spend all his life out in the woods; itwas two years and two months, with asummer off in between to live with andhelp Emerson’s family. No, these peoplewere not isolated renunciates; they actuallypractically lived in one another’s backpockets. No, they were not completelyeconomically self-made men; they relied oninheritances, living with family, gifts, andloans from one another and from family tosupport their endeavors.

Yet as these men and women emergedas “characters” in the classroom throughmy storytelling, I began to wonder just howI was “peopling” or populating our inter-pretative space, and what that had to dowith honoring the past. My experiences asa graduate student with Dr. John Mohawk,a master storyteller and Native Americanscholar-activist, had led me to think abouthow storytelling calls up the elders fromthe past, “peopling” our spaces. In hisstorytelling there was always a sense thatthese elders deserved from us not only ourlistening ears, but also that there was awhole world of obligations that we had tothem. This is a different value system tobring into the classroom, which issupposed to be all about the students: theirpresent, their future. Yet in insisting thatthe worlds of Thoreau, Emerson, and Fullerwere just as real and important as present-

day Ipods and Facebook updates, I was, Icame to hope, breaking some of thecontainerization of student cultural life bythe media. That containerization serves toinsulate us from the past to the point thatwe not only have no knowledge of our ownintellectual and cultural histories, but nosense of obligation to those who’ve gonebefore. What do we owe the Transcenden-talists, as our elders? It’s a question I’m stillworking on.

What I did see through storytellingabout Henry Thoreau was that the moreHenry Thoreaus I provided students, themore Henrys that they had to engage with.So there is the truculent Henry and theHenry who is nasty about the Irish, butthere is also the elated, visionary Henry ofthe winter and spring chapters in

Walden

.There is the Henry who can’t quite squarethe occasional viciousness he sees in theanimal world with his own Romanticism,but who still loves the sound of the animalsunder his cabin bumping their headsagainst his floor each morning.

And then there is woods-burner Henry.This is the story I’ll close with, because it’sthe story that inspired this paper, and theseriffs.

When Thoreau went out to the woods,he didn’t just go to live deeply and suck outall the marrow of life. He went to woodsalso because he wanted to crawl under arock. A story that doesn’t get a lot of circu-lation is what happened actually one yearbefore he built the cabin out at WaldenPond. He had had brief forays into teach-ing and surveying, and had failed. He triedto get published as a literary critic, and forthe most part failed. He had watched hisbeloved brother John die of tetanus in frontof him. He was twenty-six years old, andhe fell in love with his dead brother’s ex-fiancée. She rejected him. He went outcamping with a friend in the woods aroundConcord, and while they were cookingsome fish by the river, he accidently starteda fire and burned down three hundred

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acres of first-growth forest. After that, hewas known around town as Thoreau thewoods-burner, and people hated him andlaughed at him.

But he went. He went back. He wentback and stayed, and the rest, as they say, ishistory. His story.

And what a story of bravery. What astory of being lost and distraught and stillshowing up for yourself. What a story ofgoing back and being there for the lessonsthere to learn. What a story about persever-ance in the face of uncertainty.

That’s the space I want for mystudents. That’s what I want them to knowabout learning: that it is a space of stum-bling and fumbling, uncertainty and risk,but also some interesting and surprisingriffs and pathways. If I can bring it into theclassroom, I’ve not only got Henry in therewith us, I’ve got John Mohawk, as well, andthat’s some pretty good company.

How do we people our classrooms,then, through story? What characters dowe want to call up, and for what reason?For all of the ideology and moralism aboutstudents as co-constructors of knowledge,neither the students nor the teachers are theonly “characters” in the room. The eldersthat we invoke fill our classrooms as well,and they help us build that knowledge. Wehave to let them show up for us.

Introducing students to various“Henry’s” encourages them to think aboutthe variety of “selves” they bring to theirown studies. At such points during thesemester, I will often stop to ask studentsdirectly in class, “If the Henry Thoreau of1844 could be stumbling and fumbling,frustrated and embittered and ashamed,yet still eventually find his voice, what arethe stumbling blocks students themselvesovercome in finding their own voices, bothin the classroom and on paper?” If Thoreaukept trying to “find an angle” on his chosensubject, how might students do the same?These questions have led us into detaileddiscussions in which we strategize,

together, how to “enter into” material—nineteenth-century Romantic literature—that often appears murky and contradic-tory. Though some students have jokedthat they want to burn down Emerson’s“Nature” collection the way Thoreauburned the Concord woods, they appreci-ate the tenacity and bravery of the exam-ples left by the Transcendentalists.

For me, storytelling and calling up theelders (even those “elders” more well-known to mainstream American culture,such as Thoreau) challenge conventionalwisdom about celebrating only studentvoices in the classroom. Yet, it is a produc-tive stirring of the pot, because it enablesme to ask questions about the assumptionsthat underpin the student-voice-centeredclassroom. If we forefront student discus-sion for the sake of discussion, studentvoices as voices, do we collude in a youth-centered American culture that, in its cele-bration of youth, and of the present,encourages us towards historical amnesia?How does that youth-voice-centeredhistorical amnesia relate to continued USgovernment oppression of indigenouspeople here in America, and the exporta-tion of imperialist practices overseas?What do we owe the past? How do weengage that past meaningfully, withoutidealization?

Henry Thoreau, near the end of his life,explored the same questions. He hadturned to a Native American guide forrepeated trips through the Maine wilder-ness, gathering the naturalist notes thatwould eventually constitute his last work,The Maine Woods. His views of his guide aremessy and murky, but also fraught withsurprises, admiration, and humor. He tipsback and forth between idealizing hisguide and connecting with him as a humanbeing. A little later, dying of tuberculosis,Thoreau uttered his (not-so-famous) lastwords: “Indian” and “moose.” Whateverconnections he was making in his head, hewas still engaged, still trying to figure

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things out: clumsy and fragmented, butstill determined to find connectionsbetween the past and his own remainingpresent.

II. DISCUSSION AS CRAFT: MAPPING, DISRUPTING, AND LIMITING

LaMont Egle

As an undergraduate, I frequently leftthe discussion-based classroom eitherconfused or unsatisfied. During theseconversations I would often see my teach-ers checking their watches as much as I waschecking mine. I was also aware of howhard they had to work to synthesize intosome cohesive and meaningful summaryabout our object of study an array of topicsthat students had introduced in that hour.When I first became a teacher, I had manyof these same experiences in the classroom.The only change was that my perspectiveon the events had shifted from one side ofthe desk, so to speak, to the other.

This new perspective quickly gave meinsight into what conversation in thediscussion-based classroom should not be:students simply talking, well, some of themanyway, and me being satisfied regardlessof what it is they’re saying; students sound-ing off lists of ideas without regard for theidea that had just come before theirs;students who only recite general themes orideas they find in study guides; studentslooking only at me when they speak, nomatter where I place myself in the room;students who don’t speak because they’reafraid there is a standard or “right” readingof a text, and they don’t know it; and,students who are just plain afraid.

It seems that we teachers try to makediscussion happen without necessarilyteaching it as another form of communica-tion in the classroom, one with its ownprocesses and its own forms of convention.

This is not to say, of course, that discussiondoesn’t already include some recognizableprocesses and forms of convention. Manyclassrooms’ students automatically sit incircles, and instructors and students comewith prepared questions. But what go miss-ing most often in these discussion-basedclassrooms are discussions about discus-sion.

I do, however, teach two other forms ofcommunication rather explicitly in myclassroom—reading and writing. Forexample, because I want to change theways students read, and because they areoften at first reluctant to mark up texts(either the process is unfamiliar to them, orthey worry about a text’s resale value), Imake copies of a portion of the day’s read-ing and we discuss how students can markup the language and to write in themargins. And because I want to change theway my students write, we discuss andpractice how those marks and marginalnotes can grow to become charts andoutlines, and how those charts and outlinesgrow to become paragraphs and draftpages. Along with the craft of reading andwriting, I want to be more transparentabout how discussion can operate as thethird craft in humanities classrooms, espe-cially those who want to teach reading andwriting as social activities.

All three crafts—reading, writing, anddiscussing—are modes of knowledgeproduction that rely on processes of inven-tion, prioritization and revision, so I try totake advantage of any overlap I can findwhen teaching these crafts. I frequentlymap students’ discussion on the board as itunfolds, in real time, so that they can seewhat it is students are saying. This strategyallows us to go back and review earliertopics introduced by the group, and tostudy more closely how some of thesetopics have developed into argumentativeclaims, while others have not. It also givesme opportunity to show students howthese bubble-charts and lists look a lot alike

8 LAMONT EGLE, EVELYN NAVARRE, AND CHERYL NIXON


those bubble-charts and lists we generateas part of the invention process when wewrite. And writing textbooks work well indiscussions about discussion. For example,Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s TheySay/I Say: The Moves That Matter in AcademicWriting provides in its fourth chapter,“Three Ways to Respond,” templatesstudents use when constructing one ofthree critical responses (“yes,” or “no,” or“yes and no”). I experiment during discus-sion with ways students can first write outtheir responses, before they respond toothers’ claims. Students have the opportu-nity to better form a stance on a given topicbefore they speak, and they can hear, inturn, a variety of different critical positions.And my students will write questions andlead discussion themselves, eventually,which again is something many of us do inthe student-centered classroom; however,my classes do it only after students havepracticed building these critical conversa-tions in the classroom, studied the criteriafor crafting good discussion questions, andhave revised these questions in writingworkshops.

While I forge connections between thethree crafts, I also force generative disrup-tion into my classroom. I have come tobelieve that an essential part of teachingstudents the craft of discussion is disrupt-ing their typical experiences of the discus-sion-based classroom. A simple way todisrupt the typical routine in the discus-sion-based classroom is to tell students thatthey can’t look at me when they speak.Sometimes I have to hold a notebook overmy face to remind students about the rule,but the event encourages students to directtheir gazes at others as they practice discus-sion.

The biggest challenge to teaching in thediscussion-based classroom today, I find, isthat students know that there are availableto them, mostly for canonical works, domi-nant “critical” discourses on the Internet.Wikipedia and other electronic study

guides have become significant parts ofmany students’ preparation for class, andafter a bit of research online, they feelinformed enough about a works’ charactersor themes to add something to the discus-sion—but, of course, as we know, thesediscourses all too often rely on predictabletopics and general assertions.

When I was an undergrad, I took someart classes, and I remember well how apainting teacher, on the first day of a still-life class, distributed canvases, told us toset up our easels, and enthusiasticallyasked that we take out of our paint boxes allof our favorite colors. I lined up on the tablenext to my easel a large number of tubesthat included saturated blues, brightgreens, and vibrant reds. Then, this sameteacher came around, scooped up all of myfavorite paints, put them in a Ziploc bag,wrote my name on the front of it, andlocked it in a filing cabinet drawer in heroffice. She did this for all the students in theroom and told us we would get them backin time (which would actually be six weekslater), but until then, we would have topaint with those tubes left in our boxes. Ilooked down at what remained: a coupletubes of yellow (one of which I had not yetopened), a couple tubes of purple, and atube of white. This moment in my educa-tion, and one I always try to remain mind-ful of in my own teaching, actually forcedme to interpret objects around me usingunfamiliar resources. The term we usetoday, of course, is defamilarize.

When I defamiliarize students in theliterature classroom, I first work to discoverwhat it is for a given text they are actuallyfamiliar with. For example, I ask studentswhat they think are the important topics totalk about after we’ve read a first section ofCharlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and theyalmost always say things like religion,(heterosexual) love, and social class. I thenwrite these topics on the board and tellstudents that they are now “off the table.”In other words, these are exactly the things



we are not going to talk about, at firstanyway.

One unexpected outcome of this exper-iment has been that the discussion-basedclassroom becomes self-disciplining.Students have reasons to pay attention. Infact, some of the best discussions I’ve heardin the classroom are those where studentsare trying to decide if a claim is actuallyabout, say, social class or not. This samerestriction, at the same time, promotescontributions from quieter students, Ithink, because ideas of “right” and“wrong” change. The process is no longerabout parroting familiar discourses. Itbecomes instead a challenge to articulatethe unfamiliar and the unrehearsed. Thismeans we hear unexpected argumentsabout the need of female friendship, theimportance of self-determination, and whyit might be that so many people have to diein order for Jane Eyre to live happily everafter. And when we do finally return tothose familiar, or dominant, discourses—religion, (heterosexual) love, and socialclass—students are able to complicate theseideologies in ways that I don’t think theycould have done before, if this was wherethey were to begin.

III. DISCUSSION AS IDEA-INVENTION: EVALUATING AND PRE-FABBING

Cheryl Nixon

I would like to relate a semester-longexperiment of attempting to bring standarddiscussion techniques to a new context; thisexperiment was not quite successful, andresulted in a very productive questioningof my discussion techniques. Committed tothe discussion-based classroom, I haveused basic discussion-starting techniquesin my 25-30-student-sized classes and havealways thought they were fairly successful;for example, a typical technique of starting

the class with an open-ended question,asking students to jot down notes on thequestion, and then opening up the class forgeneral conversation would often lead to adiscussion that generated useful ideas andincluded many student voices. Because ofthese successes, when I undertook the chal-lenge of teaching a large lecture course, Iwanted to bring discussion into that lecturesetting. This rather naïve goal—that I’dsimply bring discussion into a 125-studentclass—led me to try some rather foolishdiscussion techniques; however, it alsoencouraged me to try some rather straight-forward techniques that worked, butworked in unexpected ways, and thus hadthe result of making me think more deeplyabout how discussion operates in my smallclassrooms. Rather unexpectedly, the largelecture experience has led me to bring someof my large lecture techniques into mysmaller 25-30-student classes. More impor-tantly, this large lecture format forced me tothink more carefully about why I valuediscussion and what the larger goals ofdiscussion are.

Last year, I taught a large lecture enti-tled The Monstrous Imagination in Literature,which featured the study of well known“monster” texts such as Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein, along with works that are notusually thought of as monstrous (such asGulliver’s Travels) and works that offer aninternational perspective on the theme ofthe monster (such as Bengali ghost stories).Held in a large lecture classroom, the classenrolled 125 students who met twice aweek in a lecture setting and once a week ina 25-student discussion section led by ateaching assistant. I wanted to teach alecture course to explore how best to struc-ture a thematic approach to literarycontent, rather than a chronological survey,and how best to encourage non-Englishmajors to see literature as an essentialcomponent of their intellectual world.What I did not expect was to use the lectureclassroom to develop forms of discussion-



based teaching that increase the student’sresponsibility for and investment in discus-sion.

Ultimately, I learned that I want toencourage discussion because I feel that itreveals what makes English studies valu-able: literary study encourages a process ofinterpretation that requires conceptualthinking. Crucially, literary study makesthe interpretive process accessible tostudents; it does not demand extensive pre-existing knowledge (a student can create afantastic interpretation of a literary text ifhe of she is willing to read closely anddeeply) and does not place limits on thetype of thinking the student can do (thereare no “right answers” to a literary text).Literary interpretation allows students toparticipate in “idea-invention.” Impor-tantly, this idea-invention is put fully ondisplay in discussion: a literary text gener-ates multiple interpretations and thoseideas must be debated to determine whichare best, revealing that good ideas cancome from anywhere (from a small obser-vation or a large theory), that ideas must beflexible and take alternate ideas intoaccount, that ideas must evolve and changeas they develop, and that the best ideas areopen-ended and allow themselves to bemade better.

Teaching the lecture class helped me tothink more concretely about how interpre-tation creates ideas and how discussiondemonstrates this process of idea-inven-tion. I’ve come to believe that four essentialelements of idea-invention are highlightedby classroom discussion:

1) Ideas are iterative: ideas must berevisited and revised. Discussion allowsstudents to experience the changeful, non-fixed, evolutionary nature of ideas.

2) Ideas are multi-faceted: ideasdemand multi-perspectived analysis.Discussion shows students how one ideacan be deepened and broadened by beingapproached from multiple perspectives—the multiple minds that exist in one class-

room.3) Ideas are question-based: ideas are

developed as answers to questions and astriggers of further questioning. Ideas canbe “pushed” to new levels by repeatedquestioning, and discussion forces thatquestioning to become overt.

4) Ideas are shared: Ideas are strength-ened by communal thinking. Discussionshows how a group can come to conclu-sions that one individual might not havebeen able to foresee.

As I taught the lecture course, and haddifficulty getting discussion to function, Iwas forced to question my understandingof discussion as an idea-invention process.By the end of the class, I became recommit-ted to discussion, even in a lecture-basedclass, precisely because this experiencehelped me to articulate how and why liter-ature teaches interpretation-based ways ofthinking—a way of thinking that I dobelieve is captured in discussion and a wayof thinking that I believe can be broughtinto a lecture.

In order to give you a sense of howdiscussion operated in my lecture class-room, let me overview a few discussiontechniques that failed. First, and mostpredictably, I simply asked open-endedquestions, as I did in my small classrooms.Some of these questions provoked answers,but the size of the room guaranteed thatonly the brave students offered opinionsand the large expanse of space underminedany sense of give-and-take amongststudents. Very quickly, this form of discus-sion-generating seemed little more than atoken gesture at student involvement.Second, I tried to implement a “failsafe”discussion-starting technique. A modifiedversion of the “think-pair-share” process, Iasked students to partner up with a studentnext to them, discuss a prompt, and then beready to explain their ideas to the class-room. In a small classroom, I typicallycirculate through the room, checking inwith pairs and their progress. Because I



could not circulate throughout the lectureclassroom, the pair discussions quicklydescended into chit-chat; few studentsdiscussed the literary text and mostdiscussed their weekend plans. Finally, Itried what I hope would be an exciting wayof, quite literally, making student discus-sion visible in the classroom. I broke thelecture classroom into small groups, askedthem to generate ideas based on a literarypassage, and then selected one group tocome up to the front of the lecture class towrite their ideas on the board. Unfortu-nately, this idea proved to be a poor use oflecture time; for example, while thestudents were writing on the board, the restof the class quickly became restless andnoisy; then, when the students tried toexplain their ideas, the class had a hardtime hearing them and the presentingstudents felt shy, awkward, and unpre-pared. Obviously, these techniques failedbecause I was simply trying to import smallclassroom discussion-starting techniquesinto the lecture classroom.

Faced with a sense that my efforts atlecture discussion were not going well, Iexperimented with variations on thesetechniques and developed several differentdiscussion-starting exercises. These devel-opments countered some of my longstand-ing beliefs about how discussion operates,and helped me to see how pedagogicalpractices that initially seem to underminediscussion can ultimately result in moremeaningful discussion. I’ll focus on myreinvention of two of my failed techniques,the paired discussion and the displayedgroup work, in order to emphasize theunexpected success that can result frombreaking the rules of discussion. I’ll alsomention a reading aloud exercise thatdemonstrates the unexpected pleasure thatcan result from very simple discussiontechniques.

One of my first discoveries centered onwhat I now think of as evaluated discus-sion. When I became frustrated that my

students were not using their paireddiscussion time wisely, I connected thatpaired work to assessment. One day, with-out much planning, I told students theywould be placed in pairs and be given aprompt to discuss—and that they shouldjot down notes as they discussed theirideas, which I would then collect for a quizgrade. The mere mention of a quiz graderesulted in focused conversation and furi-ous note-taking. I asked students to tell metheir “best idea” before they handed theirnotes in and many hands were raised andmany excellent ideas were shouted out.The artificiality of a graded conversationled to a surprisingly natural, lively, andparticipatory discussion class.

Before this class, I never would haveconnected discussion to a quiz; a quizseems punitive and seems to go against theexploratory, “no right answer,” democraticspirit of discussion. However, connectingdiscussion to a grade made the studentstake it seriously and invest more time andeffort into the process of idea-inventionthat I want discussion to embody. In addi-tion, I learned that discussion should bemore tightly connected to note-takingskills; although many students do not takenotes during a free-flowing discussion, theidea of evaluated discussion asks them torecord their discussion and keep track oftheir idea generation. The promise of theevaluation of notes guaranteed studentrecord-keeping which, in turn guaranteedmore thoughtful discussion.

As I developed this practice, I learnedto purposely differ the timing and use ofthese discussion-recording quizzes, andthey became a way to “mix it up” and re-energize the class. Often I would use themto start class to generate that lecture’s ideas,but I also found that they worked well inthe middle of the class, focusing studentson a new idea or the process of developingan idea, and at the end of class, askingstudents to summarize the session’s ideasor look forward to the next lecture. The



purpose of these discussion quizzesdiffered; for example, I would connect thediscussion to the close reading of shortliterary quotation, questioning of a conceptfrom the assigned reading, or generating ofopinions about the “big idea” of the day.The process of breaking students into pairsand collecting their notes initially tookquite a bit of class time, but as it became acommon practice, the class became veryefficient at it. The grading of the quizzessimilarly seemed onerous at first, but byworking with my TAs to grade themtogether immediately after lecture, we fellinto an efficient practice of briefly review-ing the goals of the quiz, dividing the quiz-zes up, reading them together, sharingnotable student responses, and then grad-ing them. Ultimately, this “evaluateddiscussion” mode served the goal that wehold for any discussion-based class: itcreated a sense of classroom community—even in a classroom of 125 students.

A second discovery centered on myfailed attempt to have a small groupdisplay its work on the board at the front ofthe lecture. I wanted group work to be inte-grated into the lecture format and,although my first attempt failed, I wasn’tready to completely discard that idea. As aresult, I had students use their classsections, overseen by TAs, to engage indiscussion that they would then replicate inthe lecture classroom. I came to think ofthis as pre-created or “pre-fab” discus-sion—an idea that seems to counter thevery definition of discussion as spontane-ous, in the moment, and unscripted. Iasked students to use their TA-led sectionmeeting to discuss a text, track their ideason the blackboard, and then type up thenotes recorded on the blackboard (as partof this typing-up process, I learned to askthem to add additional elements, such asquestions for further thought or quotationsfrom the literary text). The typed-up noteswere brought into the next lecture classmeeting, and I put them up on a document

projector system without having so muchas glanced at them. Although initially I hadthe students bring their notes directly tolecture due to time pressures and not aspart of pedagogical plan, this systembecame a pedagogical practice; simplybecause I and the rest of the lecture classhad not seen the notes, we could use themto interact in the spontaneous, open-endedfashion that characterizes discussion. As Iput the notes onto the projector, I asked thegroup to recount their section discussionand then asked basic questions (such as,“what ideas need more development?” and“what listed concept words seem mostimportant?”). Because the group hadprepared the notes, they were comfortablereplicating their discussion and overview-ing their idea-invention process. Thisscripted discussion provided a foundationfor a lively exchange in which students inthe lecture audience asked questions of thediscussion group.

Displaying these pre-fabbed discus-sions met my goal of showing student-generated ideas, but it also had the unex-pected benefit of encouraging students todeepen their ideas. This exercise allowsstudents to put discussion “on display,”while also guaranteeing that they reflectand build on that discussion. In my smallclassroom conversations, I often want tomove the student ideas a bit further, but amunable to get the discussion to the nextlevel of complexity or insight. Unexpect-edly, this lecture exercise gave students themeans to do that: the process of revisiting adiscussion allowed them to review thestrengths and weakness of their idea-inven-tion, and to then build on the strengthswith the help of the class. This exercise alsohad the benefit of encouraging students toengage in a bit of “meta-discussion,” inwhich the students could assess how andwhy their discussion evolved in the way itdid.

I would like to offer one last example ofan effective discussion technique that



seems to undermine traditional pedagogi-cal philosophies. Typically, in a literatureclassroom, students are encouraged to readliterature aloud, as we want students toexperience the artistry of literary writing,sensing its formal structure (such as apoem’s use of rhyme) and emotionalcontent (such as a character’s expression ofdespair). From a pedagogical perspective,we want students to have a voice in theclassroom, and reading aloud is a “lowrisk” way of having students hear theirown voices and the voices of others. Typi-cally, I have students engage in sequentialreading, going around the room in a circleor similar pattern to ensure that all studentsread aloud. However, in a 125-personclassroom, sequential reading is impossi-ble. As a result, I decided to try a “mass”reading aloud. I picked a short anddramatic literary passage and had theentire class read the passage all together, allat once. The results were impressive: 125voices reading together is very loud andvibrant. Here was the dynamic classroom Iwas attempting to achieve! When engagedin this exercise, we typically read thepassage aloud more than once and becamemore dramatic with each reading. Afterreading aloud, I would merely ask, “whatdid you hear?” or “what words did weemphasize?” and a lively discussionwould ensure. This practice seemed to goagainst one of the tenets of discussion: iterased rather than emphasized the individ-ual voice. However, the individuals in theclassroom seemed more empowered toread loudly—and even joyfully—becausethey were not alone, but joined into a massvoice.

In these large lecture experiments, Iused discussion-generating techniques thatseemed to go against the spirit of discus-sion, including discussion quizzes, pre-fabdiscussion, and all-at-once reading aloud.When I first thought of these exercises, thequizzes seemed too putative, the pre-fabdiscussion seemed too scripted, and the

reading aloud seemed to erase individualvoices—they thus seemed to underminethe goals of discussion. However, each ofthese techniques actually resulted in moreserious and successful discussion; studentstook each other’s ideas seriously, recordedand reflected on their ideas, pushed ideasto the next level, thought about how toimprove discussion, and experienced ashared, communal sense of literature. As aresult, I’ve been working to bring modifiedversions of the discussion quizzes, pre-fabdiscussion, and mass read-alouds to mysmall classroom. In the process of strug-gling with how to bring discussion to thelecture, I think I discovered some discus-sion-generating techniques that not onlyworked well in the large lecture classroom,but that would work well in the small class-room. I also discovered some techniquesthat helped me to question why I valuediscussion—and helped me to feel comfort-able breaking the rules as I did so.

CONCLUSION: REAFFIRMING THE DYNAMISM OF DISCUSSION

A crucial component of the literatureclassroom is its dynamism. Literature is anexperience—it is an emotional, aesthetic,ethical experience—and a lively discussionclassroom captures the sense that literatureis a living force. Each of our experimentswith discussion techniques has, at its heart,an attempt to not only produce deeperthinking and more meaningful analysis,but to produce an energetic exchange inwhich ideas come alive. It is this sense ofdiscussion—as an energizing experience—that we hoped to capture when comingtogether to write this paper. Evelyn usesstorytelling to “people” her classroom,bringing elders alive for her students.LaMont teaches students the craft ofdiscussion, reenergizing their thinking bydefamiliarizing their classroom position.Cheryl invites students to take responsibil-



ity for discussion, even in a large lecture,asking them to become idea-inventors.

By experimenting with techniques thatmight disrupt our students’ expectations ofa “student-centered classroom,” we hope toshow them that the classroom can be anunpredictable space precisely becauseideas are unpredictable. Surrounded byIpods, Facebook, and Wikipedia, we knowall too well that our students are shaped bya popular culture that values immediacy,social connection, experiential activity, andthe unexpected or shocking; we want ourstudents to see intellectual inquiry as enact-ing those same experiences, but in theservice of ideas. We want our students toexperience intellectual discussion that is asengaging as, if not more engaging than, thepop culture world they inhabit.

By describing the specific teachingtechniques that we use to enact our notionsof discussion as storytelling, craft, andidea-invention, we also hope to engage ourreaders in a dynamic discussion. We hopeto foster a conversation about the need toengage in discussion practices that mightseem to counter the larger goals of thestudent-centered classroom. By breakingthe rules of discussion, we not only re-ener-gized our discussion practices, but also re-energized our thinking about discussion.Ultimately, we obviously affirm thestudent-centered, discussion-based class-room and its valuing of multiplicity, diver-sity, opportunity, and democratic process,but want to encourage productive ques-tioning about how best to achieve it. Weallow our classrooms to become spaces ofriffs, disruptions, limits, evaluation, andscripting in an attempt to enact this largerideal of the equitable classroom. In think-ing about discussion, we hope to put intopractice the values of the discussion-basedclassroom itself: the ability for studentsand teachers alike to question and experi-ment—and even break some rules—inorder to discover new ideas.

WORKS CITED

Bain, Ken. What the Best College Teachers Do.Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004.

Brookfield, Stephen D. and Stephen Preskill.Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools andTechniques for Democratic Classrooms. SanFrancisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005.

Graff, Gerald and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say/ISay: The Moves That Matter in AcademicWriting. NY: W.W. Norton, 2009.

Nilson, Linda B. Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors. SanFrancisco: Anchor Publishing, 2003.

Breaking the Rules of Discussion - okcir.com IX 3/Egle Navarre Nixon.pdf1 h uman a rchitecture: j ournal of the s ociology of s elf-k nowledge, ix, 3, s ummer 2011, 1-14 i ntroduction:

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