Many college instructors know that when they assign an analysis, what students often begin with is some version of, “The story was about…” This happens because that is what they have been taught to do and that is how they are tested. Many students as well as adults read only to follow the narrative. When students encounter an assignment that requires analysis they automatically begin to retell the content of the reading selection or the case of science or social science courses retelling the steps of an experiment or reciting a theory. They may even use quotations from the text to show that they indeed read it; however, they completely miss the mark and head toward summary or evaluation. In many essays I see sentences similar to “The author did a good job when he …” Sometimes they will even tell me that their professor told them to do that, which is highly unlikely.
Early during Fall Semester 2015, a number of students came to the writing center with an assignment which involved interpretation of Dance of the Tiger, a short novel, by paleontologist Björn Kurtén that deals with the interaction between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. Kurtén’s premise is that Neanderthals and ancestors of modern Homo sapiens occupied same areas in the same time in Europe has been confirmed by fossil evidence. The author asserts that the novel is not intended to be theoretical; instead, it is an imaginative description of a possible scenario that might have taken place. Students invariably retold the story often quite accurately, with character names and places: however, they neglected to dig very deeply into the possibilities from the questions on the assignment prompt. I also read evaluation of the author’s writing and “theoretical accuracy”. Addressing theoretical accuracy could have been a possibility but would have needed other research to contrast stereotypical views and actual findings. No one could answer the questions on my first flowchart; they could only relate narrative details. I daresay a few students were annoyed by my specific questions and suggestions that they need to read more deeply in order to address the assignment. (An interesting literary Criticism Can Be Found In “Adaptationist Criteria of Literary Value Assessing Kurtén’s Dance of the Tiger, Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear, and Golding’s The Inheritors FOUND at http://www.academia.edu/3637874/Adaptationist_Criteria_of_Literary_Value_Assessing_Kurt%C3%A9n_s_Dance_of_the_Tiger_Auel_s_The_Clan_of_the_Cave_Bear_and_Golding_s_The_Inheritors
My views are not intended to point out deficiencies in the students, but to indicate where their staring points are. The types of writing and discussion they have previously experienced did not include the kinds of thinking and writing that we are asking for. Additionally, their family and cultural environment may not have required or allowed conversations that required critical thinking. Because my teaching experience has largely been in rural and sometimes culturally deprived regions, I have encountered many students who lack experience in anything more than rudimentary functional vocabulary. As a K-12 teacher and as a college instructor I have learned over the years to create bridges between academic, experiential, and informal demands. The term used today for recognizing the different ways that people communicate is called cultural rhetoric. The requirements and characteristics of cultural spoken rhetoric of people from a farm community are vastly different from the middle class assumptions for communication in college.