Strategies for Guiding Students to Successful, Freely Chosen Topics

        Students who had taken both English 104 and English 105 responded with generally positive comments about the courses, but one important difference among several they noted was that they "were more satisfied with English 105, partially because some of them had more freedom to choose their own topics in this class" (Tokarczyk).  They appear to have meant two things by this response.  First, English 105 sections usually are selected by students who have some freedom to chose which section they are in based on general descriptions of the next semester's section topics and previous years' syllabi which we make available at the Writing Program Web Site.  Beyond that, however, English 105 instructors must work toward the specific goal of enabling their students to do self-directed library and internet research using scholarly sources.  This means that, although early 105 writing assignments may involved strictly limited choices of topic within the general theme described online, the last assignments must allow students a clear measure of freedom within the norms of acceptable scholarly methods and disciplines.  English 104 assignments may be more constrained with respect to topic, perhaps requiring students to respond to a single reading, and during the summer, few students have the opportunity to acquaint themselves with 104 course topics to find one that is at least generally aligned with their curiosities and affections.  Apart from making their syllabi available on the web site, and using them to "pre-teach" prospective students why their theme or approach to teaching is important, all instructors can use some basic strategies to introduce freedom of topic choice to their syllabi after they have introduced their courses' essential content and skills.

Freedom of topic choice is something any writer cherishes.  It has been called the writer’s first creative act in the composing process.  When you constrain or eliminate that choice, explain why in a fashion that takes seriously the burden you are placing upon your students, and consider encouraging them to take compensatory creative freedom in the way their theses handle the topics.  Try to include a “free topic” assignment at some point in the semester, perhaps at or near the end.  One successful strategy asks students submit a list of three to five topics they would like to write about.  Then the teacher and student can agree on an approach to one in a brief conference that assesses the student's familiarity with resources relevant to the topic, ability to read their technical jargon at a level appropriate for the course, and sense of the kinds of theses which currently are being debated in the field.  This strategy is especially effective for final assignments in 105, in which students must use scholarly sources and a documentation format appropriate to their discipline.  Another assignment, which can work even better in English 104, asks the class to form three to five small groups, each of which suggests a topic for the entire class to write about, and makes a case for why their topic is important.  After a discussion of the topics and the groups’ rationales, the whole class can vote for the best one, or individual groups can develop their theses and research on their own topics, drawing upon and extending in original ways the collaborative research they performed in early stage of the assignment.  If your course has a content-based theme, either of these methods naturally can help develop students ability to make an informed writer’s choice from their previous thinking about that content.  This also leads to the larger question of what makes any topic worth writing about, a fundamental question for the study of the liberal arts.

In upper-division courses, when instructors are introducing students to the methods and resources essential to their major disciplines, the discussion of what topics are "researchable" and "writable" becomes even more important and helps connect the writing to instruction in theory and methods.  Combined with a historical "review of the literature" from some previous era, such a discussion can show students how the discipline's methods and resources have evolved historically.  This also can lead to critical analysis of what kinds of research are intentionally or unintentionally excluded and why they are "off limits."  Students emerge with a more historically and theoretically grounded sense of their purposes in conducting research, and a better sense of the professional audience for whom they are writing. 

Work Cited

Tokarczyk, Michelle.  "Self-Study: Writing Program."  Internal Goucher Email Document.  26 July 2002.