In my composition class this week, my students read an essay by Gabriela Moro, “Minority Student Clubs: Segregation or Integration?” Over the past week and a half, we’ve discussed how to summarize and respond to an author’s argument, in preparation for their first essay assignment (a textual analysis). But as much as I tried getting discussion going, no matter how provocative I got, my students were not responding. They were willing to answer questions, they were okay with listening to me talk and with writing things down when I asked them to. And they were okay with working in groups. But in full-class discussions, when I wanted them to talk to each other, I was just met with a wall of silence. Not antagonistic silence – just silence.
So I decided to plan this week’s lesson around groupwork with only short breaks for full-class discussion.
I started, as I always do, with a “Write Now” asking them to plan a student club. The prompt was brief: Plan a student club, thinking about its mission and activities. I gave them a shorter amount of time than usual (I usually allow 15 minutes for free-writing to start class, and this time it was just about 7 minutes).
Then we got down to business.
I asked students to get into groups of four, share their club ideas with their group members, and write a mock-application. Pretend you’re actually trying to apply to Student Affairs, asking for permission to create your club. And pretend you’re actually trying to convince your fellow students to join your club. What is the purpose of the club? What do you plan to do in this club? How can you write that up into a mission statement? They did not need to explicitly engage with the debate of the text – minority student clubs – but I did encourage them to do so if they wanted to.
After a half hour of planning, during which I circulated and prodded them to think more deeply about purpose, I explained to them what tabling at a club fair would look like, and asked them to pitch their clubs to me and to their classmates. I used the first group (who I knew had a solid proposal) as an example, asking them questions in the role of a student. By the end of this activity, students were actually calling out to ask each other questions! I was so proud of my rowdy little bunch.
The club ideas they came up with weren’t too bad, either.
My purpose for this class was mostly just to get students comfortable with talking in class. The content of the essay was not the main point of the class, to be honest – but we managed to come back around to it after they got thinking about the purposes for their clubs, and tying those thought processes to what Moro says about the uses and effects of minority student clubs.
When I tried to get them to discuss that in a full-class discussion, they went silent again. Work in progress!!
Dainy Bernstein 