Fall 1994

Student Writing by E-mail: Connecting Classmates, Texts, Instructors
Jahan Ramazani, Department of English

Suspicious as the next humanist about using technology in teaching, I was recently persuaded or perhaps seduced by the possibilities of electronic mail. A year ago, my friend and colleague Steve Arata introduced me to the idea of student writing by e-mail, and since then I've been experimenting with the medium and finding it to be an effective device in teaching. In my classes, it has enhanced the preparedness of students, deepened their engagement with the material, and improved the quality of their writing. It has helped to free them from the role of passive consumers, since their e-mail submissions make them more aware of their role as active creators of meaning. It has fostered much stronger intellectual ties among my students ties that continue after the semester is over. And it has enabled me to get student debates and discussions going before class meets, so that by the time we congregate, students have already begun to define their ideas in relation to the material and to a broad field of responses.

I offer two examples of what I've been doing with e-mail, in the hope of stimulating new experiments with the medium.

First, the weekly essay. In one form, this idea is familiar from the Oxford tutorial system: students write one or two essays a week on a set text, meet with their tutor and a couple of other students, read their essays out loud, and then discuss, defend, and attack one another's ideas. E-mail makes this exchange of essays possible not just among two or three students but among a seminar of fifteen or twenty.

Two nights before the class meeting, half of my students write brief essays and mail them to a central mailing address (what's called a "mailing list"); the address instantaneously distributes the essays to me and to all the other students in the class. The night before the seminar, the other half of the class writes critiques of their colleagues' arguments and sends these in as well. Everyone reads everyone else's essay, so that by the time the class meets, multiple debates and discussions have sprung up, and students have staked out their initial positions.

In class, I can then use the electronic essays to pursue significant points of intellectual disagreement, to define the salient issues, and to draw out quiet members of the class. Sometimes I juxtapose contrasting ideas from the essays and ask students to explore further the conflict of interpretations. There is no question, under this system, of whether students have or haven't done the reading; they have done it and have crystallized ideas about it.

In the middle of the semester, I re-read the essays written so far (saved in electronic "folders") and write a private evaluation, trying to show students how they might strengthen their writing, their thinking, and their strategies of argument. But they have, meanwhile, been learning a great deal about how to write and think effectively. Every week they have tried out fresh ideas with more spontaneity than the formal paper allows; they have read one another's essays and discerned what works and what doesn't; and they have clarified their own voices within a sustained and animated electronic debate.

Second, the short description. While students are using their e-mail essays to elaborate a detailed interpretation of the material, I also ask them to arrive at a succinct formulation of their ideas and send these to the rest of the class. Each student tries to find a few keywords or phrases that best encapsulate what is characteristic about the author or work we are studying. I then compile all of these entries on a one-page sheet, grouping similar ideas together, and distribute it at the beginning of class. Thus, for the poet Philip Larkin my graduate students arrived at an evocative list that included entries like:

• kitsch sublime
  
• atheist's awe of eternity
  
• juxtaposition of Romantic agendas with modern conditions
  
• obsessed with the passage of time, aging, change
  
• curmudgeon on the outside, soft and scared on the inside
  
• afraid
  
• struck (by the ordinary, which he illuminates)

Taken together, a long list of such phrases provides a marvelously diverse, rich, yet cogent set of formulations that can spur further dialogue and debate within the classroom. Indeed, the list is often more helpful than the standard introduction offered by an anthology or by a lecturer like me. Sometimes I ask students to work on the list in groups and to decide what they think the most problematic and most helpful formulations to be. In doing so, they inevitably get quickly immersed in the large critical questions and debates that have swirled around the subject. Further, the list of terms can function as a handy reference point when it comes to reviewing for the final exam.

The possibilities for using e-mail in teaching are more numerous than I can describe. Even so, I should also acknowledge that the medium has its flaws. About once a semester, all the essays stall in the pipeline because of a computer failure, uselessly arriving at their destinations after the class has met. Students who don't upload their essays from disk occasionally lose their essays in the process of sending them (no doubt the most brilliant pieces of the semester). Such technical problems can result in panicked phone calls, wasted effort, and botched class plans. Still, for me, the benefits of e-mail outweigh the gastro-intestinal distress it sometimes causes.

Let me offer one piece of practical advice that might help to avert calamity at the beginning of the term: ask students to send you their userids by e-mail. If, as I once did, you circulate a sheet and ask students to record their userids from memory, the likely mistakes will result in your being bombarded by dozens of error messages a most unhappy fate, I assure you.

Some instructors prefer newsgroups to mailing lists. Although I like the privacy and structure of the lists, newsgroups allow for more free-form discussion with minimal intervention by the instructor. In either case, our willingness to use e-mail surely takes pressure off the trees, though I must confess that I still assign formal papers in my classes.

You can direct questions about mailing lists to postmaster@virginia.edu. If you prefer the telephone, you can call Janet Sakell (982-4697) or Jayne Ashworth (924-0619).