English 2783
The Art of Fact: Contemporary Literary Journalism
Prompt # 14
28 October 2013

Assessment, reflection, further steps

Assessment continued

As I've said before, part of my aim as a teacher is to help students become more confident and competent at assessing their own work, at knowing whether or not they've done a good job at something. Obviously, in a situation like a class, it's pretty difficult to be sure other than by comparison with the work of others, because the job you're assessing has only its social context as a way to evaluate it (if you build a chair, and someone sits on it and it collapses, practical reality tells you that obviously you've done a bad job -- but if you write a report and you can't tell whether it was informative because no one responds, it's much harder; if you don't know what other examples of the same sort of work might look like, you don't really have much of a basis for assessment). That's part of the reason so much of the writing in my classes is "public" -- either accessible to everyone else in the class, or sometimes accessible to audiences beyond the class.

The same applies to the preliminary learning reflections many folks have just written. You may or may not have read the reflections by other people in the class; I urge you to do so. There are lots of reasons to do this; one is that others may have described kinds of learning that you'd never thought of; another is to get a sense of what the range of the documents is, and where yours might fit in. It's important to remember that it's quite possible for all of them to be excellent (or for none of them to be); that's a larger judgement, and one that can be better made by someone with lots of experience of such documents (like me, for example). To help you understand that, I've posted a description of how I read learning reflections; it's here.

Further, before the end of the day tomorrow I'll have a basic form up which will allow you, anonymously, to make comments or suggestions on, or ask questions about, the conduct of the course so far. I'd hoped to have that available now, but was out of town and mostly off line from Thursday till last night. I'll email when it's there. One reason for doing this is to make as clear a distinction as I can between what goes into a learning reflection and what goes into a course evaluation; another is to give me a clearer idea of what people think is working and what's not.

In class tonight

There's been a fair bit of writing and questioning on the forum; I want to give us a chance to discuss all of it (there are things that are more effectively achieved face-to-face than in writing; let's do that). We'll take up each of the works people have read, and their contexts, in turn, and discuss them.

For next time

It's time to widen our net. Some people would clearly like to spend more time on the writer you've been working with, but this is a survey, not a seminar. The best way to widen our scope at this point is to go back to the folks who write about this form and see what they have to say, and who they claim are the important practitioners and what the significant works are (and why). I'd intended to start this cycle with what we'd listed on the bibliography wiki, but we haven't yet spent much time with that, so I'm going to take a shortcut. I've put together a list of works offering overviews from various perspectives; it's on the course Web site.

Here, then, is your assignment for next time.

In the next day or two, go down to the library and locate one of the books from the 15 in the top part of the list. Have a look at it, and if it looks to you like it would be worth spending a few hours with, check it out of the library and send an email to the course list saying you have it.

Spend at least a couple of hours with it (remember the seven-hour principle). Look for whatever it has to say that you think might be most useful to us, and tell us what it is (don't simply say it's there: again, your job here is to be a reporter, not a reviewer or recommender). Write a substantial explanation of what it has to say -- especially, if possible, what writers and pieces it mentions as especially important, or what it has to say about the history or development or character of literary journalism, creative nonfiction, long-form journalism, or whatever we're calling it. Include a list, if that works best.

Publish your description, using the title of the book as your subject line, in the Books about Literary Journalism forum. Publish it in time for people to read it and reply before class next Monday night -- that is, before Saturday night if possible, Sunday night if necessary.

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