Each group has two assignments: contribute questions for class discussion on two occasions, and read and give feedback on one short essay (or research paper) draft from each member of the group.
On each occasion when you bring discussion questions to class, decide on a limited number (2-4) that you want to emphasize. You are not obliged to provide your own answers to these questions, but you might want to tell the story of how and why they came to be important ones for you. I also encourage you to contribute to the class discussion insights from your small group discussion. However, try not to do so “preemptively.” Present the questions and whatever background you think appropriate, then see where the discussion goes. You may want to pose additional questions in light of the ideas and opinions people express. While the amount of time that I will allot to these questions will vary, it will typically range between 25-40 minutes.
Giving feedback on each other’s essays is going to require coordinated effort. As a group, you need to plan several weeks ahead. Begin now to schedule meetings at which you will discuss specific essays. Since you have three weeks to submit to me the essay on which you get small group feedback, you will probably want to follow roughly this schedule:
Meet in person. E-mail and other on-line tools can be used to supplement meetings but are not a good substitute for face-to-face dialogue. Do the readings beforehand. If something happens and you can’t complete the readings before your group’s meeting, don’t stay away. Go, apologize for being less prepared than expected, then play a valuable role: have the others outline the reading you didn’t get to, and ask questions about it.
When you first assemble, choose a note taker or decide how you will share this responsibility among yourselves. Find out how much time each person can devote to the meeting (if you have not already done so) and set an ending time accordingly. If you have several goals for the meeting, decide on the order in which you will deal with them and make initial allotments of time for each goal. Do you want someone to facilitate the meeting? The facilitator is typically responsible for keeping the group focussed on its goals and time-budget, for calling on people during discussion (recognizing hands-up as a sign), for preventing or untangling “traffic jams” (people butting in or everyone talking at once, etc.), and sometimes for highlighting or summarizing important points and for asking the group if it has finished with a topic when this seems to be the case. You may not need or want a facilitator, but in this case each member of the group should bear these responsibilities in mind. If you do have someone in the group facilitate, choose a different person next time you meet. While the facilitator is not excluded from speaking, their responsibilities tend to limit their participation in the discussion.
You may want to spend some time at the outset fielding questions about what puzzled you in the readings: arguments you didn’t get the sense of, references to people and events unknown to you, or vaguer uncertainties such as why an author deems important an issue that seems trivial to you or why they ponder a problem whose solution seems obvious to you. Pay attention to what you find nonsensical--it may lead your consciousness toward that of the author’s.
Let your internal censors (and their external counterparts) take a vacation. Risk the apparently silly or simple question, and avoid patronizing the ideas or questions of others. Censorship (or, when practiced on oneself, prior censorship) will hobble your group’s thinking. Lay out the feast first, then decide which dishes look the best. Think of your group’s process as iterative: you ask a question or pose a problem, everyone speaks to it, you see where the responses lead, then you review and assess the fruits of the conversation. You must eventually make individual and group judgments (for example, which questions to raise for discussion, how you’ll revise your paper based on the group’s input). But to employ a judicial term, judgment requires that an issue be “ripe,” and ripeness is better achieved in an atmosphere that is more nourishing and free-spirited than critical.
Consider being guided by the following ideals: (a) balanced participation; (b) attentive listening; (c) responsive conversation; (d) creative inquiry. By balanced participation I do not mean requiring that each person speak for exactly the same amount of time (a silly and rigid measure), but welcoming and making space for each person’s participation. Have periodic go-arounds, for example. If you are an easy and fluid speaker, work harder on your listening and questioning skills. If you seldom speak, push yourself a little, perhaps by making notes in advance on some points you’d like to raise. Or speak by asking questions.
Balanced participation also depends upon mutual respect. Disrespect in conversation is like disenfranchisement in politics: when successful, it excludes people. It has nothing to do with agreeing/disagreeing. If in disagreeing we take account of the other’s argument and give our own reasons and evidence for opposing it, then we show respect. Curt dismissals and patronizing replies are typically the stuff of disrespect.
Attentive listening means actively focussing on what someone is trying to say. It means you’re “all ears.” (But it also means paying attention to the whole person--gestures, posture, position and so on all communicate important information, as does your intuition and your emotional and cognitive reactions.)
Responsive conversation develops out of balanced participation and attentive listening. The whole dialogue is greater than the sum of its parts because people creatively feed off of each other’s contributions. The conversation is exciting because it takes off in unanticipated directions; your group feels like a band of adventurers. Don’t lose sight of the fact that what you learn about each other from a conversation about a reading may itself be relevant to the reading.
Creative inquiry is the product of responsive conversation and a willingness to (as a popular bumper sticker puts it) “Question Authority.” The most obvious authority is that of the author, but questioning an author’s authority is not so straightforward as arguing with her/his thesis. As more than one famous French philosopher has argued, the authority of authors is largely conferred upon them by others--it’s a social construction. In light of this, to question the authority of an author entails several things. First, it means developing an understanding of how others have appealed to the author in order to authorize ideas and values they wish to promote (or inversely to exemplify ideas and values they wish to criticize or demonize). In other words, it means at least suspending the authority of other’s interpretations of the author, while also recognizing that an author is not strictly a set of writings or a symbolic figure (e.g., Locke the liberal) but rather a whole ensemble of relationships across history. You yourself, as an active reader, contribute to the (re)creation of the authors you read.
Second of all, questioning authority means granting yourself the liberty to make your own acquaintance with the author. Why is the author making this argument? Would you have a different impression of the author’s meaning were you her/his contemporary? What if you shared the author’s gender, race, class, ethnicity, institutional location, etc. (or if you do, what if you didn’t)? What about the author’s persona, style, and mode of argument -- how are these related to the substance of the argument? Do you like or trust the author? Why/why not? What are the implied presuppositions in the argument? Has the author drawn you into agreeing with these presuppositions without having to advocate them? Could the author have had a mischievous or devious intent? Was the author really speaking his/her own mind, or was their writing shaped and constrained by social and discursive conventions or the requirements of political conflict?
Finally, questioning authority means considering the relevance (including possibly the irrelevance) of the writing to you and for the time and place in which you live. Here, the problem of authority becomes the question of what authority you grant the author.
You can apply this approach to each other’s writings and to mine just as well as to the readings in this course. Questioning authority, or what could also be called deconstructing the author(ity) of writings is, as someone said, a way to make it possible to breathe again.
1. What is the issue? How did this issue arise? What is the background and history, and who has been worried about this?
2. What is the speaker's position? What is the speaker's main opponent's answer? Can we tell the opponent's argument?
3. What does the speaker offer as support?
4. What is the speaker's point of view?
5. What is at stake? What difference will it make if one side is right rather than another? If we assent to the argument, what else must we assent to? What will change? What are the consequences of this argument being right or wrong?
6. What other issues are related to this one? If we grant or deny this argument, will that tend to settle some other controversy?
This is a good discussion question: obviously important but having no simple, pat answer. Questions that call for a judgment (of the merits of an argument or the meaning of a passage); that highlight controversial claims; that ask one to consider interrelationships, make comparisons, or assess the bearing of social and historical context on a writing; that illuminate latent or hidden features of a text or focus on ambiguities or apparent inconsistencies in it; or that explore connections between the text and present day existence can all make good discussion questions. Discussion questions need to be open-ended while still having a definite relationship to the texts being discussed.
Read the essay beforehand and make notes on it. Think of the paper as initiating a dialogue between you and the author. Your response needs to be two-dimensional. One is that of an active reader. Along this dimension, your response indicates how you’ve received the message--the sense you made of it, the difficulties you encountered attempting to understand it, what you learned from it and appreciated about it. In the second dimension of your response, you are the author’s ally or double, another writer. Put yourself in the author’s place in order to help him or her construct a better paper. In developing your feedback, bear in mind the following points:
As a small group, you may want to begin by each telling the author what you understood the main theme(s) and argument(s) of the essay to be (in other words, begin from the role of readers). If you do this in the form of a go-around, don’t repeat points already made, but do note where your impressions differ from those of others.
After this, you could do a second go-around shifting to the role of writer.