by Joseph Robertshaw, University of Alabama in Hunstville

In this post, Joseph Robertshaw shares a peer review activity he’s used to scaffold peer review activity through oral discussion and embodied pedagogy.

Introduction

Reading Peter Elbow (1995) set me to thinking about the responses we get from others concerning our writing and subsequently the problems of peer review. The problem of audience and my students’ difficulty grasping the concept was a problem that led me to Bazerman and Tinberg (2015). They seemed to hear just what I was thinking when they wrote that “we form our sense of the self through taking the part of the other in our struggle to make ourselves understood. Such a view, while no longer positing that the author is dead, does encourage us to see the text as existing independently of the author and thus capable of being changed and perfected by the author and others”(p.62). The attempt to apply that concept led me here.

I have been using Walkin’ and Talkin’ for several years now as a late-stage-draft peer review exercise. I have used it in classes such as First Year Writing I & II, Strategies for Business Writing, Intro to Technical Writing, and New Media and Rhetoric. Students consistently report that the activity helps them understand Audience and its relationship to Purpose in ways they did not see before. For me, as a teacher, I value this as an assessment that actually does the work of assessment without the pressure of a high-stakes evaluation. The products my students create after this exercise are holistically better than the ones created before this activity. If your students are ready for this, it can be eye-opening and well worth the front-end prep. Writers need to see their writing as a thing, separate from themselves, that has a destination and a mission. This activity helps them learn how that works in applied practice.

Overview of The Activity: Walkin’ & Talkin’

The Talker walks with the Listener to a destination and tells the story of their current draft.

The Listener walks with the Talker and listens to their story speaking ONLY when appropriate.

The Listener is permitted only 3 possible utterances

1. I don’t understand. (ask for clarification)
2. Oh that’s good. (show of support)
3. Why is that? (ask for backing) (Toulmin, 2003, p. 94)

When you reach your destination exchange roles for the trip back to the classroom.

Explanation and Reflection

This activity, which I have named Walkin’ and Talkin’, MUST be done at the beginning of a class session! This activity is one of the main contributions of this article because it offers a moment when the author and audience identities must be inhabited in a short window of time. This is an extra revision/editing exercise that I like to use if the weather is nice—if the weather is poor, I have moved it indoors to hallways and walking tracks as available.

It works best if done closer to a draft due date to help the students to focus their argument/narrative in their own minds and really own it by getting out of their minds and using their bodies. As Abby Knoblauch (2012) states “to ignore the body privileges the white masculinist discourse [of disembodiment] as universal” (p. 59). Since we are more than talking heads we should involve our whole person in any attempt to envision ourselves occupying a new role.

Science also lends its voice to this idea that walking helps humans inhabit their bodies more actively. Walking “led to improved creative performance [. . . also,] walking left a residue that produced strong performance when participants were subsequently sitting” (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014). In classes students are, from an early age, usually asked to remain in their seats unless there is some emergency or a performance of knowledge task to complete, like writing on a chalk board or whiteboard. They may perceive most requests from teachers in classrooms to be further tasks in a long string of micro-performances. For such students this next activity may seem a little odd. I make sure to tell them that it is okay to feel uncomfortable sometimes, stimulating thought about knowledge transfer, a little incoherence, and maybe even metacognition. There is much more here to research concerning the body and brain, and the ways they work with, or are kept from, each other in education. Our purpose now however, is not to explore that phenomenon in depth but rather to make good use of it, to help students write better.

So I ask them to walk, in pairs (instructor chosen), to a randomly selected location. I place the names of nearby places on campus, which might take 5-7 minutes to reach by walking, on strips of paper which are drawn from a hat/box/container. I try to reserve a nearby location or two for students with reduced mobility needs—but this consideration does not influence the pairings—and I send the pairs off for a walk. I ask one person to talk about their paper on the way out to the location, then switch roles, so that the other person can talk on the way back about their own paper. Feedback is limited to allow the body and senses to think and embody the story for the writer and to embody the audience role for the listener.

The only responses that are allowed are:
* I don’t understand. (ask for clarification)
* Oh that’s good. (show of support)
* Why is that? (ask for backing) (Toulmin, 2003, p. 94)

The responses are meant to allow the writer to physically—in real time and sequence—see and hear where their argument seems confusing or weak without ever having anyone say “this is weak” or “this writing is confusing” which can be confrontational among peers. The walking also stimulates circulation of oxygen to the brain even as it takes composing out of the classroom and into the world. Like Plato’s Socrates in the Pheadrus who walked to reflect, Bunyan’s Christian seeking the way to the Celestial City, Steinbeck’s Lennie and George walking to a new social situation, or even Tolkien’s Frodo and Samwise who walked to defeat evil, the students take turns being: the speaker and listener, the self and the other, the teacher and the student. They try to make themselves understood by attempting to understand the other and their needs as an audience. It is a rhetorical dexterity to be able to hold multiple roles at one time.

Through this practice, many of my students begin to look at storytelling and narrative differently, as writing and composing are attached subconsciously to this act of walking and talking which they have been doing for years. —What? We already compose stuff? — Why yes you do. Tweets, Facebook posts, Mass Texts, Texts, Snapchats, excuses why you were late to this class, explanations to your friends why you can’t hang today . . . these are all examples of composition in various modes and registers, composed for different audiences. If they don’t know that they are composers and critics how can they practice refining those roles toward academic uses? How can they come to the conclusion that each role can help them become better at the other?

They must see and claim their expertise so that they can confidently offer advice to other composers and consider the advice of others well. It is incumbent upon teachers to show them the experience that they have as Patricia Bizzell (1982) states “all discourse communities constitute and interpret experience” (p. 230). We also have another charge as posited by David Bartholomae (1986) to help them adapt that experience to new settings. How can instructors guide these practices if the topic is not discussed in the professional development training and CEU’s they receive? Perhaps a tangent for another time.

As I await the return of my wandering composers, I have written a question on the board and instructions for the students to answer it in their journals/blogs. It reads like this: “Having shared your composition with your peer, can you identify some areas where you need to revise or explain in greater depth your own message in order to achieve your purpose with your audience?”

There is no sound quite like the frenzied clacking of 20+ sets of fingers upon keyboards when they return from walking and talking. The ordered thoughts that come from live non-evaluative feedback create a condition in which the thoughts flow through the fingertips as fast as the writer can allow. No pauses. No groans. No Writer’s block.

I have observed that the time needed to complete the reflection entries that come after these walks takes twice as long as other entries. Over the many academic terms in which I have employed this activity, the time allotment had to be increased from 5 minutes to 10 minutes. Infinitely more interesting though: is the fact that at the end of those 10 minutes of keyboard clacking, at least a quarter of the class, in 100% of those sections, protests that they want more time to finish their reflections. I see this as intense engagement.

References

Bartholomae, D. (1986). Inventing the University. Journal of Basic Writing, 5(1), 4-23.

Bazerman, C., & Tinberg, H. (2015). Text Is an Object Outside of Oneself That Can Be Improved and Developed. In L. Adler-Kassner, & E. Wardle, Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (pp. 61-62). Logan: Utah State University Press.

Bizzell, P. (1982). ” Cognition, Convention and Certainty:What We Need to Know about Writing. Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory, 3(3), 213-243.

Elbow, P. (1995). PETER ELBOW ON WRITING:A Conversation with America’s Top Writing Teacher. 1-18. (J. Saxe, Editor) Media Education Foundation. Retrieved 1 25, 2015, from http://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/301/transcript_301.pdf

Knoblauch, A. A. (2012). Bodies of Knowledge: Definitions, Delineations, and Implications of Embodied Writing in the Academy. Composition Studies, 40(2), 50-65. Retrieved 12 13, 2017

Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking On Creative Thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142-1152. Retrieved 10 23, 2017

Toulmin, S. (2003). The Uses of Argument. Caimbridge: University of Caimbridge Press. Retrieved from http://johnnywalters.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/3/5/13358288/toulmin-the-uses-of-argument_1.pdf