Someone Tell Me, Please, How Do I Make My Students Care?

In "Performing Writing, Performing Literacy," the authors discuss how performance can play a role in the writing process. In particular, they draw a distinction between writing done for the classroom and writing done for oneself. To elaborate on this distinction, they summarize I. A. Richards's notion of "inter-animation of words," which states that the meanings of words and text can shift depending not only on "their context within a sentence, but also [...] given their embodied context and their physical location in the world" (228). Context is all important in the creation of a text, as illustrated by the performative writings of Beth McGregor and Mark Otuteye, cited at the end of the essay. When students write texts outside of class - journal entries, notes for a debate, song lyrics, or what have you - they generally have more invested in the writing, and are less likely to see it as busy work. The challenge, then, for us as teachers is to make our assignments seem less like busy work and more like texts in which students should take a vested interest.

Merely turning classroom writing into an opportunity for performance art is not enough to achieve this task. We have given students opportunities both this semester and last to turn text into performance: group workshopping of assignments has an element of performance, as do the facilitation groups that students were required to take part in in English 101. In many instances, however, the performative element of these assignments did not make students any more interested than they normally would've been. As with any other assignment, they saw these things as hurdles they had to leap over in order to get the grade they wanted in class. In the worst instances, students became self-conscious, fumbled the ball in front of their peers, and ended up feeling embarrassed and humiliated.

The trick, then, is not merely to turn all writing assignments into performances, but to find some method of tying the assignments to the sort of writing (performative or personal) in which students are interested. This challenge is one that I'm currently facing in my classroom. In response to one of my decompression questions for paper 2, "What do you wish I as the instructor had more adequately explained in class," two students replied that they didn't see the point of the assignment, that it seemed to them like busy work and they weren't sure what I was expecting. My knee-jerk reaction was to place the onus on them: if they had such a relevant question, why did they not bother to ask it in class, after class, during office hours, or in an email? And while part of the responsibility for getting an answer to such a question is theirs, I'm also interested in figuring out how to convey to students the idea that the papers we have them write aren't just busy work. I've related to them in class the idea that learning how various discourse communities approach writing will help them understand how discourse communities they're a member of approach writing. I've related to them that critically analyzing the rhetorical choices that other writers make will help them make similar rhetorical choices in their own writing. But these things, of course, sound abstract at best to a freshman college student and ridiculous at worst.

While this essay raises some interesting ideas, I am still left with the question of how (and whether it would even be helpful) to integrate performance into the classroom in a way that is meaningful to students. And, perhaps more importantly, I'm always interested in finding ways to develop in my students a vested interest in completing their assignments beyond the authoritarian "You'll do it if you want to pass this class" or the abstract "In the future it'll help you analyze the texts you're actually interested in." If anyone has an answer, I'm all ears.