response to Durst/9-23-09

Although I very much admire the intent of Durst’s research and feel that he is attempting to address some very legitimate questions, I have doubts in his methodological design. For one, I don’t know how generalizable any of his findings are, as studying four different classes is a very small sample, and his selection of four case study students out of 2,500 seems so small as to possibly provide little more than anecdotal information. Similarly, I don’t know that a large college in the mid-west is typical of all American colleges nor that the students in Ohio are necessarily the same as those in, say, San Francisco or Boston or Montgomery, Alabama. (They very well could be exactly the same, but I have no reason to believe that without evidence.) As Durst admits, the University of Cincinnati has a professional/business focus, and the students he studied might have been predominantly of the sort that would be less interested in writing to begin with and see writing instruction as something that was to be endured in order to get a good grade and move closer to their end goal.

Further, however careful he was not to influence the learning process, Durst’s role as observer in the room immediately changes the dynamic of that entire class, and it’s very possible that the increased engagement observed in a few of his case study students was due to his regular interviews with them discussing class topics. His offer of giving the students who volunteered to be case study examples extra help with their writing (and even money for lunch, in one case) provides another confound in his research, as that further complicates how representative his volunteers actually were.

I don’t mean to be nitpicky here; I believe in Durst’s goals and see no duplicitous intent in his methods. It’s very possible that my reaction is off base and that I’m still viewing this study through the lens of the “Research Methods” class I took while getting my Master’s Degree in Psychology, but I don’t know that I’m ready to believe that his experiences are necessarily typical of students in the United States, in the mid-west, in Ohio, or even at the University of Cincinnati. It seems possible to me that the specific nature of his findings could be limited to those four groups he studied and the unique composition of those classes.

That said, I have no reason not to trust Durst, either. He knows far more about this topic than I do, and his findings make sense to me (someone who, admittedly, knows nothing about this field). Still, I sometimes think that Durst forgets what it’s like to be an insecure and inexperienced freshman. I remember being in a Geology course during my freshman year and being surprised when I learned that England was an island and that Spain wasn’t located in South America (and this was after four years of high school Spanish!). I was an honor student from a fairly good high school, I read a lot, and both my parents were college professors, but I was profoundly naïve about almost everything that would require critical thinking. Even so, I got the sense that I was still much better prepared than the majority of the students in my freshman writing class, despite the fact that I knew virtually nothing about anything.

I don’t provide that example only for pity (and recognition that I’ve heroically overcome my previous state of ignorance) but to suggest that it might be a bit much to expect that freshman are able to fully understand what making a good argument entails after a few class exercises and reading assignments. To fully engage these tasks, we’re essentially asking a student to engage his or her entire body of knowledge to articulate what topics are worthy of consideration, how they might be explored, and what constitutes a legitimate argument. In some ways an introductory writing course is a frightening place to be wrestling with these emerging skills, testing them in a situation where those prospective ideas can be rejected and result in embarrassment and a bad grade, a task that’s made even more complicated if you’re not exactly sure who you are or what you believe quite yet.

I think we take for granted just how sophisticated these tasks really are, especially for someone who has little or no prior experience working in such a milieu. This is a skill that they’ll be developing (hopefully) the rest of their lives, and it seems like a monumental task to be challenging a lifetime’s worth of superficial thinking and rebuilding a student’s analytical worldview over the course of two semesters. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but I think it’s reasonable to remain mindful of the difficulty inherent in this undertaking.

Similarly, I can understand students’ hesitance to fully engage writing assignments and class tasks where it is expected that they explore a controversial issue and potentially make enemies of their classmates, make a bad impression on their professor, and expose themselves as not understanding an important issue. As such, I’m puzzled by Durst’s surprise that students were reluctant to discuss teenage pregnancy with a student who was visibly troubled by the topic because of her intimate experience with it. In this setting, saying little and being quietly respectful seems to be a reasonable and understandable response. No doubt, some of this resistance to critical thinking and argumentative writing is due to simple indifference and disinterest, but I think Durst’s findings that students are often simply confused about what they are supposed to do is an interesting insight. It might seem obvious that students need to understand their assignments, but it’s easy to forget that they don’t speak our language and that we need to make our assignments as clear and explicit as possible. Since we're essentially teaching our students to communicate more effectively, the responsibility falls on us to model this behavior and make sure we're considering our audience, too.