Canned Goods

Last Friday we had a writing center staff meeting, wherein we divided into group and looked over a few scenarios that had been written up by a few of the TAs. I always have a problem getting inside a particular role because the situation is so decontextualized–I’m not this TA; I really have no idea what the student was really like; I’m missing every piece of sensory data I would use to judge the situation: the attitude and body language of student, for instance. Anyway, I’ll do my best to recreate what happened.

The Scenario (summary): A student comes in with the assignment to come up with a “controversial” claim regarding the possibility of paying reparations to African Americans for slavery and the results of it. This student takes a anti-reparations tack. The TA believes it’s a racist argument and is offended. What do you do? Just focus on the argument? Try to change the student’s thinking?

For me, there’s a lot going on here that I can’t do justice to in a brief blog. And even with a 20-30 minute conversation as a whole group, we never finished talking this scenario out. There may never be enough time.

But the general trend in the discussion went towards changing the student’s thinking. On a predominately white campus in a predominantly white city, racism is a problem. And many TAs felt it was appropriate to educate the student (and help their writing in a 30 minute session). The “fix ‘im” voices were becoming a chorus until, again, a comp-rhetor (gosh we’re smart folks) said she was uncomfortable with this and asked if we would question the claims of a student with progressive ideas. To me, the response of the chorus seemed to justify their ends, but another comp-rhetor asked if we needed to effect a wholesale change of the student’s thinking or perhaps we could work for “pockets of doubt.” Awesome! This is where I was signaling that I wanted to speak but it was already 5., and I was batting cleanup, if I got to the plate. End of meeting.

What I would have said was influenced by my colleagues’ comments. If I were in that situation I would have worked for those pockets of doubt, not to undermine the student’s argument or the fix ‘im, but rather to talk about argument, specifically the Toulmin model since it carries so much weight in English 100 and the TAs are familiar with it. What’s easy to forget about this model (especially when the former course textbook forgot about 1/3 of the model) is that it includes not just Claims and Support & Warrants and Grounding (Backing) but also Reservations and Qualifiers. They were not present in the text. And my research of comp textbooks presented a pattern of giving much more space to claims and support than anything else in the Toulmin model.

During my first semester teaching here the most common complaint from TAs was that they had trouble teaching what they didn’t understand: Warrants and Grounding. So, they focused mostly on Claims and Support–something familiar to freshmen, who often come in from high school knowing that when they make a claim they need to find support for it. Then it’s a “good” argument.

If I were in that situation, I would have found this a perfect place to discuss Reservations and Qualifiers. Perhaps this discussion would have worked to improve the argument and sew those pockets of doubt.

Of course, and this was brought up at the end, if you read the assignment prompt and it says write a “controversial” claim, how responsible do you hold the student for the claims made?