Every morning, I drink my coffee from the blue cup pictured above. It’s unsymmetrical and has a rim that’s a bit thin and the glaze is uneven. However, I love starting my morning with this cup because I made it myself in a pottery class last year in my first attempt at cup-making, which was more challenging than I thought it would be. When I shaped the cup on the wheel, it got quite a wobble because it turns out that it’s not easy to create the perfect amount of pressure with your hands on a slick, fast-moving surface. On top of that, I had to coordinate the action of my foot pushing on the wheel pedal with what my hands were doing and what my brain was trying to tell my hands to do. Nothing about that came naturally.

However, when I stopped my wobbly wheel in frustration at what I’d tried and was about to punch down my “cup” into a lump of clay, my teacher came over and discussed my effort and then asked me to put my right hand around the wobbly cup and squeeze gently. She explained that doing so might make my uneven vessel into one that was delightful to hold in my hand because it would fit my own hands’ contours. And she was right. It is a delight to have a cup that’s so completely mine. I later glazed it a light shade of blue because that color reminds me of a bright morning sky.
A few weeks later, when I was in another ceramics lesson, I was attempting to make a bowl, and I got it too thin at the top, and then the edge of it caved in slightly and formed a strange little divot.  I stopped my pottery wheel and was about to scrap my project when my teacher again suggested that I keep it as it was. She said that once it was glazed, that little divot might take the color in a particularly beautiful way, and I might just like it like that. She explained that those quirky little flaws that come from learning how to throw on a wheel make a vessel something unique and that someday, when I could form perfect bowls, I would miss the way that my initial bowls had turned out with imperfections and character.

The experience of being a pottery student made me think a lot about the way I teach in my own classroom, especially when it comes to encouraging a “perfect” product like a student research paper. It seems to me that there is much to celebrate about the process of student writing, including the quirks of a learner who is still coordinating the many elements of their composition: their sources, organization, phrasing, and citations. Reliance on tools like Grammarly, ChatGPT, and Co-Pilot might produce a “perfect” essay, but it so often removes all of the character from the composition. Thus, I’ve been seeking a way to encourage students to craft a paper that shows the contours of their learning just as distinctly as the hand-shape of my coffee cup does mine.

Here are a few strategies that I have in mind for emphasizing the process of writing, as a means of achieving a more distinctive end-product:

  • Have students start by diagramming their initial thoughts on a whiteboard, perhaps working in small groups within the classroom to brainstorm ways of answering the question prompt as well as the sources they might use to support their ideas.
  • Then outline their ideas, including their thesis statement draft, in a cloud-based document (such as GoogleDoc or Word365) that’s shared with me so I can offer supportive feedback and make suggestions if/when their efforts begin to “wobble.”
  • Guide the students in class on ways that they may use an AI tool to address specific trouble spots that they might be having with their writing, but not allowing them to put their entire product into an AI tool for a re-write. Having students use Grammarly Authorship (which tracks the provenance of the content and can flag sections copied/pasted from elsewhere or composed by AI) for their writing process allows for you as the instructor to better track the student composition process.
  • Reinforce to the students that the process is more important than the end-product, and encourage them to embrace the rough parts that arise along the way, rather than using AI to “fix” them.

Some links that may offer some inspiration as you begin the Spring term:

Are you trying to better understand your GenZ students? This Chronicle article, Some Assembly Still Required and this Chronicle series might help. Perhaps the most important book about GenZ that I’ve been reading lately is The Anxious Generation, which links many of the issues we see in our classrooms today to the habitual use of smartphones and apps.

What might happen if we encourage agency in our students, rather than achievement? The answer: “The skills today’s learners most need won’t be writing a flawless essay or cranking out lines of computer code. Instead, they will need the kind of curiosity, emotion, and agency that humans alone can conjure because these are the things that can’t be outsourced to machines.”

Have you read Kevin Gannon’s Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto yet? He was the keynote speaker at the January CETL Conference and his book is available to read digitally via our campus library.

The Atlantic explores the modern phenomenon of alone-ness (note: you may need to login with your Chapman credentials to read the article). I particularly liked this quotation, “We should ask ourselves: What would it mean to select technology based on long-term health rather than on instant gratification? And if technology is hurting our community, what can we do to heal it?”

The Oscar-nominated documentary, Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat, is worth watching as it tells the story of the 1961 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba through jazz music, vintage video clips, and eyewitness accounts. (Kanopy streaming available through our library)

Have you considered using the Hypothesis tool to have your students annotate PDFs and other online materials? This list of upcoming workshops highlight how you might use annotation in STEM, Humanities, and in research based courses. Here is a helpful blogpost with a list of other digital tools that you may want to consider for your Spring courses.

Finally, this owner and cat have become internet-famous for their pottery wheel collaborations. Perhaps they might spark some creativity for you as well? And in this youtube video, inventor Simone Gertz sets out to make a clay cup but ends up making a flower lamp (“flamp”) instead.