In Class, Students Read and Write and Read and Write
Friday, January 12, 2001
Student Anne Warner reads a section from the article and then reads from a short passage she has written in response. "I don't understand how he as an author can say these are the rules about cockfighting," Warner says. "He comes into this society and says this is how it works."
Comer wants the students thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of Geertz's approach to writing, and she takes up on Warner's comments. "Think about who is and isn't in the article," Comer says. "There is no mention of women or children or even of men of lesser social status. He's just looking at a small subgroup of people. What does that mean for the article?"
Later another student points to contradictions in the article. Geertz claims cockfighting is about social relations rather than the money earned in betting, but he also spends a lot of time talking about the money.
"Contradictions are an interesting way to enter a text," Comer said. "For a writer, you have to ask, what are we going to do with these contradictions. In anthropological writing, there's going to be a tension between being an observer and being a participant. There are going to be limitations in trying to come up with something significant in one reading. There are always going to be questions about who has the writer excluded, what has the writer privileged or reduced?"
Comer's approach to teaching the courses is similar to many of the other newly hired teaching fellows. They've drawn up the course around themes; three examples this year are the clash of cultures, the tension between individual liberty and the common good and the debate about student life on Duke's campus. Students critically read a range of texts, and writing assignments focus on their responses to the readings.
In Comer's class, students focused their writing on a group they selected. Examples included expatriates in Japan, conservative Republicans and surfers.
Early on, students wrote about an element of the group's history and about a selected image from the group. Later, Comer had students select a passage from a class reading that related in some way to their own final project and then write a response to it.
There was always at least one writing assignment required for every class. The aim, she said, was to have them think "about strategies of writing and strategies for thinking about the theme of the course."
"I see these two goals as being quite integrated," Comer said. "We generally talk about some particular aspect of writing instruction in every class, either using our course readings or student texts as examples.
"I think the students found this course to have importance and relevance. I haven't overheard too many complaints about the course containing 'busy work.' I think that's a sign that the themes the teaching fellows focused on illustrate more thoroughly for students the broad applicability of writing instruction. They got to see that writing can be a cornerstone to and undercurrent of all academic disciplines."
