Contributing Blogger: Katie Logan
Some of my most fascinating consultations during the past few weeks have been brainstorming sessions; with final (and larger) projects coming up, and a little bit of know-how when it comes to center resources, students often use their first visit here to begin their projects. I’ve seen all sorts of cool assignments—political arguments about the end of the Cold War, an introduction to the soundtrack of a student’s life, play analyses and final engineering projects. Despite this variety (or perhaps because of it), I always feel an initial panic when I realize a student won’t be handing me a draft to read. Brainstorming consultations present a unique set of challenges: how do we structure a session to help students walk out of the center with a sense of their project while maintaining the non-directive, non-evaluative approach we champion?
The following strategies have worked for me recently; I hope you’ll share some of yours!
1) Begin with the prompt. My consultations have taught me that, often, even if the student understands what the prompt asks, he or she doesn’t necessarily know why it’s asking. The prompt is a brainstorming goldmine: what does the student think the instructor hopes will be accomplished? What kinds of skills and knowledge gained from the class should the student demonstrate in the final project? Does the prompt offer a sense of how the student should structure or organize the assignment? By teaching students to read prompts carefully (or, better yet, by sending them to the Center’s prompts workshop!), we help them understand the larger goals of their work.
2) Write a sentence, but make it the right one. Many of my consultees dream of world where they come in to the UWC for a brainstorming session and walk out with half a paper written. Obviously, that doesn’t happen. I’ve experienced sessions, though, where students just want to develop their thesis statements with a consultant, and this process often proves really fruitful for thinking about the rest of the paper. If a student has a tentative thesis statement, I like to ask him or her to break the statement into the smallest pieces possible. How many of these pieces will the student have to prove to convince a reader of the statement as a whole? Encouraging students to see their thesis as a road map for the paper helps them to develop a cursory outline that follows the logic of their argument.
3) Focus on process, not product. Brainstorming consultations have a tendency to turn into therapy sessions; often, students feel stuck and nervous about the inevitable writing process and really just want someone to help them feel more confident before they begin the paper. I find that, in their concerns, students share a lot of information about the problems that have plagued them in past assignments—difficulties getting their ideas onto paper, insecurities about grammar, confusions about research. Even if you don’t tackle the project itself, attempting to address some of these processes might help a student feel better prepared. In a consultation I had this week, the author of the aforementioned Cold War paper explained that writing the introduction had taken him hours, and as he tried to construct his thesis, I noticed he was writing full sentences and deleting them almost immediately. I suggested that he take 10 minutes of the consultation to free write everything he was thinking about his topic with no concern for organization and with absolutely ZERO deleting. By the end of the time, he’d generated a couple of pages of content that he could then begin to revise and edit and he seemed a million times more relaxed.
4) Remember that a framework leaves lots of space for creativity and adaptation. I’d never asked a student to consider free writing during a consultation before. Given this student’s set of concerns, though, I felt like it might be useful, and I offered it to him as one possibility for his time in the center. Now that I’ve seen its success, free writing is something I’ll suggest to other consultees in the future. Having a few strategies in my pocket gave me a place to begin but still left me the space to restructure my questions and to shake up my consulting routine. That’s where brainstorming sessions get fun (and educational)!
Katie Logan is a consultant at the Undergraduate Writing Center and an Assistant Instructor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing. She holds an M.A in Comparative Literature from UT-Austin, and she is pursuing her PhD in the same program. Her research interests include contemporary Arab women’s literature, travel narratives and loss and trauma.