Course Letters

Communication Across the Curriculum
Monmouth College

Course Letters

(16 October 2006)

Here’s another low-stakes (in this case ungraded) writing activity that promotes engagement, critical thinking, class discussion, as well as collaborative learning. Art Young, an early communication-across-the curriculum advocate, uses an activity in his courses that he simply calls “Letters,” which can be adapted to any course where you want students to engage in sustained critical thinking and inquiry.

Process:

Early in a unit, divide students into pairs, and ask each to write a letter to the partner, asking questions, primarily, about initial “problems” encountered with the course content being studied (the book, concept, theory, etc.). Encourage students to look for complications and tricky areas that they want to explore further. The letters can be handwritten, taking about 5 minutes (about 200 words long).

Then, after the course content is discussed in class, ask each letter writer to compose a response that suggests possible answers to the questions; the response can also raise other issues that the pair can continue to explore. The response is a bit more formal: typed and about a page-and-a-half long (500 words). One copy of the response goes to the partner and one to the professor.

Finally, encourage the letter writers to discuss their responses, either through informal writing or face-to-face discussion.

Responding:

Rather than grading the writing (although his approach varies, depending on his purpose), Professor Young reads through all the letters and makes notes to himself, which he shares with the students in class, commenting on patterns of thought, unique insights, content areas that need clarification, etc. He also selects excerpts from letters that the students can read aloud to the class, modeling close reading and detailed writing as well as generating new issues about the course content.

Benefits:

The Course Letters:

	promote cooperative learning;
	promote sustained inquiry, inside and outside class, into important course content;
	encourage students to generate questions and to complicate their learning process; and,
	foster informal thinking on elevated content—the sort of academic conversation students can continue after the class ends.

(Adapted from Art Young, "Mentoring, Modeling, Monitoring, Motivating: Response to Students' Ungraded Writing as Academic Conversation." Pp. 27-39 of Writing to Learn: Strategies for Assigning and Responding to Writing Across the Disciplines. Eds. Mary Deane Sorcinelli and Peter Elbow. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997.)

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