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164 T EAC H In G WI T H ST U D EnT T ExT S describes a college sophomore whose education was transformed when he heard a senior classmate saying, ‘I have a theory about why. . . .’ Meier argues that, at its deepest level, being well educated means ‘getting in the habit of developing theories that can be articulated clearly and then checked out in a thoughtful way’” (Graff 2003, 24). Even though Meier stresses theory’s transformative qualities here, she also characterizes theory as a practical tool that intellectuals use to examine and engage with their subject. To approach student writing as theory, then, means to design workshops that ultimately ask this question: what can we as thinkers and writers do with the ideas in this student text? The workshop I discuss in this essay concentrates on the writer’s argument and encourages students to think theoretically in that it asks students to do further work with their own and with another writer’s ideas. When students see that their writing presents ideas that can be worked on—that can be applied to other texts, elaborated on, even challenged—they begin to see their ideas as having value and participating in intellectual conversations within and beyond the classroom. ano ny M iT y, readi ng alo ud, and oT her ( noT So ) P racT i cal MaT T erS Before going into detail about this particular workshop, I want to briefly explain some of the general workshop procedures I use and my rationale for using them. First, when it comes to selecting an essay to workshop, I tend to choose a piece that exhibits a problem I see in a number of different student essays. I use the term problem here in its most positive sense, meaning a question, line of argument, or stylistic feature worth thinking about with students. For instance, if I notice that a set of papers relies on a particular part of an assigned text to make their arguments, I might choose a representative example and ask students to discuss why they found this part of the text valuable and to consider what would happen if the writer chose to include other passages from the text as evidence. When conducting these kinds of workshops—which in many ways resemble the “writing seminar” that Joseph Harris describes in this volume—I preface our discussion by mentioning that an aspect of the particular essay we’re examining appears in other student papers, and that we will concentrate our discussion on this topic. One reason I prefer to workshop representative essays is to make discussion relevant for Texts to Be Worked on and Worked with 165 all students in the class. Students sometimes complain that workshops are useful for the writer of the particular essay under discussion but have little value for other students in the class. Choosing a representative essay helps combat this attitude. When reproducing student work, I keep the author anonymous. I am aware that erasing students’ names from their work appears to contradict my project of encouraging students to think of themselves as intellectuals ; however, I want to create a space where students explore what it means to be an intellectual in their own terms—something I think would be compromised if I declared the author’s identity. More powerful for me, and I think for students, are moments of self-disclosure when a student announces to the class that she is the author of the piece under discussion. In my classes such occasions present powerful teaching moments, opening up conversations about authorship, persona , and authority. Although on occasion I ask students to work in small groups with excerpts from different student texts, I prefer conducting whole-class discussions of an unabridged student essay. Organizing a workshop this way takes up more class time, but it prevents the problem of students reading an idea out of context. More importantly, focusing our sustained attention on one whole student paper suggests to students that their writing is worthy of the same consideration as the assigned course texts. To focus our attention even more, we read the entire essay aloud before discussing it. I typically select students at random to read individual paragraphs, and I ask students to keep a particular question or idea in mind as we read aloud, marking passages in the paper that relate to this question or idea. This kind of tactile work with the student text reinforces the idea that student essays...

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