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September 19, 2003
Yellow hat tip
Call it a harmonic convergence. I'm at school on Friday (a rarity), having just concluded a successful dissertation prospectus hearing, and I've spent the last hour just browsing around. Came across an entry on Adrian Miles's blog that happened to coincide with some thinking I've been doing lately.
I'm on several dissertation committees this year, and I've been thinking on and off about the experience of writing one. Despite my field's avowed commitment to the importance of discourse communities and collaboration in the writing process, we don't always extend those beliefs to our practices, particularly when we talk about graduate education (as opposed to the first-year composition classroom). Our graduate students receive the benefit of the doubt in terms of their writing, and they are encouraged (more and more) to aspire to publication, wherein they write something on their own, and receive criticism only as a result of blind, anonymous peer review.
But then, we also ask them to write dissertations, where they work intensely with a group of five readers, who will not always agree among themselves, and whose role in the process is almost always more intensive and ongoing than it would be were they simply anonymous blind reviewers. In other words, at the end of 3-5 years of writing for us, we turn around and demand of our students that they write with us. And let's not even get into the issues of the micropolitics of committees, which can scar candidates and colleagues alike for a long time.
Adrian's entry is about his attempt to develop a culture of criticism among his students, something that occurs in English studies (in this country) only for those who pursue an MFA in creative writing. To this end, he adapts/adopts Edward de Bono's hat exercise, giving students concrete and specifically defined roles (which they will rotate) as they participate in the critique of each others' work. Obviously, the ultimate end of this kind of exercise is to enable them to adopt each role with respect to their own work, but I can imagine that it also frees them up to develop their abilities in each role, without falling into the kinds of interpersonal micropolitics that can clog up any attempt at group critique (i.e., hate the hat, not the player).
I would also add that, particularly in a doctoral program, part of our responsibility is in helping our students learn how to wear the blue hat, the one that facilitates and manages the critique or discussion. Graduate school is where they have a finite amount of time to make the transition from student/teacher to teacher/student. Each of us somehow manages to develop an internal blue hat, one that will help negotiate all the roles we have to take with respect to critiquing each others' and our own work, managing the classroom, etc., but I have to think that we could do a better job helping our students (and each other) with that development.
And I'm in a discipline where graduates typically have at least 5-7 years of classroom experience before they ever apply for a position. I shudder to think what it must be like in less teaching-intensive disciplines.
Posted by cgbrooke at September 19, 2003 05:27 PM