Thoughts about Student Logs

I wanted to take some time to explain more fully how I'd like the student logs to function and what I think their potential is.

I think that the most important writing, the most important part of the class itself, are the logs. I know this will seem strange to students who are used to attaching importance (or having it attached for them) to those items they are graded on. And the logs are ungraded. Furthermore, they are an "informal" space---a space of notes, quick thoughts, first ideas, fragments, comments, trial runs. I don't expect fully fleshed out, developed and polished arguments to appear there; those things are the proper matter of formal essays. So why am I putting so much value on them? Because I value them pedagogically: they are a necessary prior step before any completely realized ideas can be set down in essay form. In other words, they are one of the spaces were actual learning happens. Graded papers are the final product of learning: examples of what you know. Before you can express ideas, you have to produce them, you have to work things through by reading, by talking and also by writing. Writing can be an important creative medium, not just a fancy display case for the finished results but the actual tool you use to learn.

The logs are also an autodidactic space, a space for self learning. The end goal of education in general should be to teach people how to teach themselves. In a successful class the teacher would be no longer necessary, the roles of "teacher" and "student" re-conceptualized. Therefore, it is the student's responsibility to make the logs useful to them; it really is up to the student whether the log will be an exemplary and significant moment in their education or just some assigned task to be done as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Of course that doesn't mean I won't help you or make suggestions about what you can write about (I'm already doing that, by the way, in my individual comments). For example, I've suggested that you begin by using the log as a space to discuss that week's class: the film, discussion, anything else pertaining to that session. But that's just a starting point. You can also ask questions about the class, bring in points from posts you've read on the main class blog for further discussion, or describe examples of other narratives you've read and seen that might connect with issues we're exploring in class.

Most importantly, I've asked you to use the logs as a self-reflective space: somewhere not only to state your opinions, but to begin asking questions about them, reflecting on them, becoming more self critical and thoughtful about why you have the responses you do. That's an important part of education. To end a class without ever having questioned any of your prior ideas, opinions and assumptions is an intellectual failure.

So what you do in the logs is in large part up to you. My only rule is that they are not to be a space for facile movie "reviews." No thumbs up or down, no points, no stars. After all, this is a class. We are screening films in a classroom. And discussing them in various educationally institutional spaces, face-to-face and online. We are not watching movies in the same way or for the same reasons that we do outside of classrooms---primarily for entertainment. We are studying different kinds of narrative texts, subjecting them to analysis and investigation, learning how to see them---and by extension, the world?---differently.

Also, don't forget that the logs are situated in a public space. By posting them online, students have an opportunity to break out of the individuated and one-way discussions that usually characterize learning. Although every class consists of a group of people, rarely does any truly collective production of knowledge take place. Students, and many teachers, usually respond to classes as simply a group of individuals. Learning to think about class as something non- or trans-individual can be difficult.

Most students have not been taught how to ask questions in class or how to structure a discussion for the good of all participants. They have never been given the opportunity to learn these skills. And some don't even seem to register the fact that there are other people in the room at all. The idea that each student might have a responsibility to something more than just his individual whims is often nonexistent. That you can ruin a discussion by setting a trivializing tone, or by blocking serious discussion, or even by not participating---in other words, that what you do has consequences for everyone----is an idea few students seem to have ever encountered.

The online logs, though, can be an opportunity for truly collective discussion, collective learning. Which is how knowledge is actually produced----no one creates ideas in a vacuum. Knowledge is built out of, is built on the work of others. When Sir Isaac Newton remarked, "If I have seen farther it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants," he wasn't being humble but giving voice to how knowledge is created: no one's insights are ever truly individual. (And Newton's remark is itself an illustration of this since he borrowed the phrase about past writers, philosophers and scientists as "giant's shoulders" from earlier writers, notably the 13th Century monk John of Salsbury, who in turn probably borrowed it from an earlier source, Bernard of Chartres.)

So start reading other student's logs, and my comments on them and adding your own. Start commenting on my posts on the main class blog (and reading those comments and adding your own to them). Think about questions you want to bring class and use the log as a space to articulate those questions. Hopefully, little by little, the logs will become a record of your growing awareness of how you engage in narrative interpretation: how you've learned to "read" films, stories, and all the many other narratives we encounter in our daily lives.