Expanding the project
Nancy Chick: After the conference, thanks to the encouragement of Mary Huber, we expanded the discussion by inviting new voices and putting together this collection of essays. We wanted to extend our reach further into the arts and humanities, so we now have creative writing, music, dance, foreign languages, and literary studies alongside the original composition, theater, and graphic design. The authors started out by considering how their specific field implements moments of structured disciplinary feedback in the classroom and what students learn from these moments. They paid particular attention to describing what these activities look like, opening the classroom doors for those who’ve never been in a dance or music or foreign language classroom. The result is a variety of pedagogies with some elements in common (e.g. responding to disciplinary artifacts, systematic methods for these responses, the centrality of student voice, the applied nature of the activity, formative and summative variations, a developmental progression of activities and goals) and, unsurprisingly, plenty of elements tailored to each specific context (e.g. the disciplinary artifact at the center of the activity, the form or genre of the response, the specific moves of the responses, the rhetorical stance of the activity, the implications for student learning). Even the language used for this pedagogy varies from a precise term for the activity itself (e.g. “critique,” “peer review,” “workshop”) to more generic language that focuses on its rhetorical position (e.g. “feedback,” “criticism,” “analysis”).
Beyond describing an effective pedagogy, each author also considers how these classroom moments reflect the discipline’s ways of thinking, knowing, doing, and feeling—or how each represents a signature pedagogy, Lee Shulman’s term for ways of teaching a discipline’s “habits of the mind, habits of the heart, and habits of the hand” (2005: 59). Some authors are among the first in their fields to explicitly articulate their signature pedagogies (Heinert, Kearns, Motley); others are building on previous discussions to consider specific implications within their disciplines (Galina, Hastings, Heinert and Chick, Kornetsky, Stukenberg).
We also extended the discussion by bringing in co-editor Emily Hipchen to provide a new perspective and some critical distance for the conversation, and to ultimately discuss what we’d learned. What follows are a few highlights of that discussion from an extended online chat session between me in Calgary (Canada), Motley in North Carolina (United States), and Hipchen in Georgia (United States). I started by asking Motley about his takeaways from the project.
Reflecting on the project
PM: I found a lot of common threads about critique, and feel that several of the contributions are fairly in line with each other—especially the essays that focused on creative writing, composition, art/design, dance, theater, music. Each of these essays spent some time unpacking the process and value of critique in the classroom, focusing to some extent on the hands-on aspect of critique. I also saw overlap in the structures of critique, such as the need for iteration, the value of reflection, expert/novice relationships, social dynamics and power structures, the need to use disciplinary language, formative vs. summative feedback, procedural steps of a critique, modeling how critique works, etc. Some of the other essays seem a little bit more focused on meta-level issues. Nancy, your essay with Jen and Ben’s on foreign languages are broader in my view, more about the big picture of signature pedagogies writ large. Others, Jill’s in particular, critiqued the process of critique and pointed out that it’s not always rosy and good. I also like Jen’s thoughts about growing as one who critiques towards a level of autonomy and self-sufficiency.
NC: Yes, a developmental activity, not a discrete classroom activity but part of a series that occurs over time. This reminds me of one of the common features of the arts and humanities mentioned at one of our ISSOTL Interest Group panels: the process of any learning activity is as important as product. It strikes me that critique—when facilitated well—is firmly grounded in some of what we know about the processes by which learning happens. In Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment, Pellegrino et al. (2001) conclude that “assessments, especially those conducted in the context of classroom instruction, should focus on making students’ thinking visible to both their teachers and themselves” (4). In most situations, critique or peer review or workshop does precisely that work of making thinking visible—but a very specific moment of guided thinking. Again, Pellegrino et al. say that “students learn more when they understand (and even participate in developing) the criteria by which their work will be evaluated, and when they engage in peer and self-assessment during which they apply those criteria” (9). What’s made visible in critique is the practice in applying these criteria. This metacognitive work is powerful, something we know for certain about how learning best happens.
PM: Essentially the “rubric” becomes a living thing for students. The mystery is removed as the criteria for good or bad are debated live during the session.
Emily Hipchen: Aren't we talking about values, then? Making visible disciplinary values via critique? Or even cultural or community values?
PM: To me, it makes it all visible. Students understand why something works or doesn’t. They receive multiple views from peers and instructor. And yes, there’s surely a community and social dynamic: students have to communicate and even defend their assertions to others. Having to do so makes them consider both what they say and how they articulate their views to other students.
EH: And it makes visible to all that they can have views, even if they aren’t experts yet—they’re learning to be experts.
NC: Right, bringing us back to the idea that critique is developmental, part of the work of learning the path from novice to expert. Critique is one way students learn the disciplinary frameworks—one of the requirements of expertise.
PM: Yes, with the ultimate goal of having students become able to focus the lens of critique inwardly towards their own work. This is what experts do.
EH: I think too that the instructors are part of this in the way that they—the experts—are also learning in and as part of that community. I see in these essays the way in which experts look to the recursivity of critique, how it exposes everyone’s process and values, to improve his or her own work. The implication of these essays is that critique is modeled for students, but is itself a key process for the instructors in their intellectual lives and production. Neither the essayist nor the dancer works alone: what they make is the product of a conversation and a community of learners who are teaching–learning together. Thus, all cultural production of value becomes “expert” or “good” not by fiat, handed down as a mystery from on high, but rather through exchange, conversation, communal discourse, and input. In asking students to participate in critique, instructors are not, however, utterly decentering expertise—critique isn’t simply random chat. It implies there will be a good that we can suss out and agree on, and that the instructor can guide that exploration. The instructional focus in critique is on finding and approving criteria for what makes “good” “good,” knowing that there is a reasonable “good” to be found.
PM: The teacher becomes a facilitator or a scaffolder as much as an instructor. To use Stukenberg’s language, a “co-explorer.” I like the way that sounds, mostly because it holds true in my experience.
EH: I wonder if we can talk about the differences in approach to products that are performative or ephemeral, rather than something like a piece of writing, which seems at least more permanent or repeatable. In the essays in this issue—as probably in the classroom itself—these seem to be differently handled, especially when it’s critique that’s about revision rather than end-stage evaluation, that’s formative rather than summative.
NC: Right, in these instances, the product that’s being critiqued is the process. The learning product is the learning process, or vice versa.
PM: That definitely seems more difficult unless the performance is being captured somehow.
EH: But even so, even if we’re able to watch, we can't as dancers or musicians make that performance exactly the same. What we have to do is recapture something like the whole experience—who we “were” in the past—and try to get back there—but we can't. Without the examples from dance, theatre, and music, we, as thinkers about these issues, might be tricked into believing that the product is the point, instead of the process. I’m wondering if this is what all critique is for: that it’s not about the object being critiqued (the draft in whatever form), but how we approach making whatever we make—a dance, a poem, a piece of graphic art. In these critique or peer review or feedback moments, we’re teaching (as Hastings says) a mindset, a world approach. We want students to form and correct habits of mind, rather than simply fixing a draft or changing their embouchure. Overlaying the unrepeatability of a dance on something like writing suggests that whatever happened to bring that essay into the world is also not exactly repeatable, nor is the essay itself any more or less ephemeral than a dance. It's just the technology of writing that makes it seem so, I think.
Ultimately, the essays from the performing arts encourage us to refocus the whole conversation to the way critique changes the person and not the artifact, the future and not the thing-at-hand. Once we realize that, we end up rethinking what we’re revising via critique: not the object, but the mind. Then, we refocus on what thinking like this does to us, not on what we’ve made. In other words, if all we do is fix an essay or picture or lab report, we miss the point of critique, which is to remake habits of mind and heart, which will naturally remake habits of hand.
PM, NC, EH: We encourage readers to pursue the insights shared here in the essays that follow. What does this practice look like within and across these disciplines? How does it “make the ‘rubric’ a living thing”? How is it ultimately a signature pedagogy: not just an activity in which students learn to make good designs, performances, stories, or papers, but also (and more importantly) a way to teach students how to develop the habits of designers, dancers, musicians, actors, and writers?
