Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Teaching bad articles...

What do we think of this? I haven't read all the critical work on every text I'm teaching in my grad class - give me a couple of years and I will have a better handle on it. There are, of course, seminal articles for many of the texts that I've assigned. But in certain cases, I've assigned articles that are generally related to the theme of the class and on that particular text. But I haven't read the articles yet...

This week, I teach a major canonical text that I've taught many times, but never taught any criticism on it. One of the articles I'm teaching is germane to the topic, but written...poorly. Now, this is a golden opportunity to interrogate the different ways people make (convincingly or unconvincingly) arguments in essays. But how have you all dealt with this in grad classes? Do we mention up front, "this article, while discussing a topic that is central to this course, has important structural problems..."? I think one of the most important things about a graduate class is that it should help students begin doing or continuing the critical work for which they're being trained. However, I've noticed a lot of grad students resist this a bit - they're annoyed when they read (or are assigned) bad articles; they either agree whole-heartedly or totally reject it. It's a subtle thing to be able to take from a critical piece what you can and learn stylistically from the challenges presented by the structure, etc. I think it's rather like listening to a sermon - the challenge is to take from it what helps you the most. I think it's problematic when you take the whole thing in without question or dismiss it all out of hand.

So, how have you approached the teaching a so-so article (it's not horrible) to a grad class? Or do you read all the criticism before you assign it?

8 comments:

Catrala said...

Hi! I'm a long time reader but I'm not sure I've ever posted...

I've never taught criticism (which makes sense, given that I'm still in grad school) - but the ways that I have found best in terms of dealing with *bad* criticism come from a class I had in my first year of the MA. Each student had to select an article related to the text assigned for a certain week, and then presented it to the class - not only distilling the argument, but also noting what they found effective or ineffective about the piece. Discussing what makes criticism good and what makes criticism bad, or rather lacking, in very concrete terms in that class has been very useful to me since then.

So, basically, I would say that a bad article is an opportunity to learn from in terms of modeling criticism, as well as helping us to realize (and this was key for me as a new grad student) that not everything in print is necessarily good, and that it's OK to disagree with parts of articles, entireties of articles even, and engaging with them, good or bad, can help us to see new ways to engage original texts.

Pilgrim/Heretic said...

Um... that's exactly what I was going to say. It's a great moment to call their attention to their reaction as readers to bad writing, and how poor construction can mute a good argument. It's one thing to yell at them to organize their ideas and write clearly, but when they think about that from the reader's end, it makes a little more sense.

medieval woman said...

Hi Catrala, welcome - thanks for chiming in! I think it's a good opportunity as well. What I want to do is make sure I don't begin saying: "there are serious problems with this" but rather "what did you think about the structure of this argument"?

P/H - good to hear from you again!

Thoroughly Educated said...

I've taught an exercise similar to what Catrala describes. I asked a group of new MA students to describe and evaluate both the argument of their assigned article and the success or otherwise of the strategies the author used to present the argument. I found that insisting on that description and evaluation of the argument and the presentation of the argument were four separate steps (sorry, not explaining that too well) helped the students - and me - avoid the "hated it" reflex.

Notorious Ph.D. said...

Once, in a senior seminar, I had to throw together about half the articles based on the titles and the journals they were published in. Week four comes along, and I'm reading right along with the students, and I realize that one of the articles I've assigned is a real stinker.

So, I get to class, freaked that I'm going to have to spend the whole time telling them why the thing I just had them read was 70% wrong. But within the first 10 minutes, one of them raised a tentative critique of the article... and that opened a can of worms. Apparently everyone had had their doubts. And we dissected the thing bit by bit, comparing it with the primary sources we'd read for that week. By the end of it, I figured that they'd learned very little content, but a whole hell of a lot about how it was okay to critique an established author's argument.

Final analysis: I'm not sure I'd do it on purpose, but it did work out well in the end.

Profane said...

In all likelihood, I will never teach a grad course, but in my current upper division seminar, I have assigned a number of articles which are not necessarily 'bad', but certainly present arguments which I do not buy. Once I made that clear, the students, to my delight, began to deconstruct the articles on their own. We had a VERY lively discussion of Jane Chance's article about Grendel's mother last week.

Belle said...

I don't do grad stuff, but I've found having upper div students do the critiques works really well on many levels. Sometimes I give them the citations (they then have to get the article) and sometimes I make them find them. Then, as Catrala said, we use what they find to structure the class: they learn to find, to critique and to read, and maybe, just maybe, to write better.

Bardiac said...

I like trying to get students to read critically; I think bad articles are often really useful that way. And even great articles can be read critically, right?