We spend a lot of ink in Thinking on the Page on asking questions: we think it’s central to meaningful writing. And as teachers, we work hard to encourage our students to learn through enquiry. But when we ask first-year college students in our writing-intensive classes to start their essay-writing process by asking questions about a text, they get uncomfortable. Why? Probably because they’ve come to associate doing well in school with demonstrating mastery. Asking questions makes them feel like they’re showing ignorance. Students understand that asking questions is inherently scary, because it entails risk: when a student asks, “what is going on in this moment in the text?”, she’s letting everyone see that she doesn’t know the answer to the question she’s asking. What if she gets it wrong? What if she chooses something that isn’t what the professor had in mind? Better not to ask at all, students often feel. Often students are reluctant to take risks or ask questions in writing they way they might in other areas of their lives, because of the widespread (but patently false) belief that writing demonstrates how smart you are. When students believe that a “bad” paper will make them look stupid, they’re less willing to try things out.
Encouraging students to ask questions can be tricky for teachers, too. We’re often told that the teacher’s job is to serve as the authoritative voice in the classroom: to transmit information, to teach students through demonstration. When we ask students to ask questions about a text, we’re giving them the green light to undermine that authority--or so it can seem. After all, if students are asking real questions, their take on the text might not agree with ours; we can get answers we didn’t foresee. In an instant, a teacher’s carefully planned progression through the text can be completely derailed: then what?
All of this can seem too risky, too much like teaching on a high wire. But it’s worth it when students have the opportunity to think hard about a text instead of anxiously searching out right answers, and, often, feeling defeated because the answers they think are “out there” seem so far out of their reach. We keep pushing our students to ask questions, even when that makes our jobs challenging, because we know that the writing of a good paper starts with a process of meaningful exploration. When students ask questions, they engage with the text actively; they find potential points of investigation, and identify their own interests. And that gives them space to figure things out for themselves, rather than simply reiterating what they already know. We all want our students to learn to analyse, to be critical consumers of information and culture. And if we want our students to take risks with their thinking, the only way forward is out on that high wire.