I've noticed lately that there have been a lot of Philosophy papers coming through our writing center. I have worked on two in the last week myself.
My Philosophy background consists of Intro to Philosophy (taken three years ago) and Art Theory (which sometimes includes a wider range of philosophers) so when a student wants to make sure that they are fully answering their teacher's prompts and proving that they understand the content, I'm not very confident in helping them because I'm unfamiliar with most of the material.
So I researched tips and common trends in working with different disciplines and I found a really great article by a writing center group who studied their tutoring reports and found common trends amongst students with Literature, History, and Philosophy papers.
They found 2 major areas of concern for these assignments:
1. Understanding how students imagine they are addressing an assignment (What elements of the assignment are they addressing? How are they attempting to tailor their response to discipline specific demands? How is their knowledge of the subject shaping their response to the assignment?)
2. Understanding students' expectations regarding a tutor's knowledge across disciplines
In both Literature and History assignments the most common concerns the tutors found amongst their sessions were: organization, revision, and getting started. The most common difficulty stemmed from the writer's dependence on summarizing the text or historical facts. The article gives a couple strategies on how to help the student differentiate between summarizing and their own analyzing and interpreting.
Most relavent to my last few sessions, the article also discusses the difficulties in working with Philosophy assignments:
"We’ve seen a few who do provide some assignment guidelines, but students are so overwhelmed with the foreign nature and difficulty of the subject that they don’t make much use of them. We’ve also seen that, while tutors generally feel confident enough as writers to tackle philosophy tutorials, it is one area where tutors do express a certain frustration with their perceived lack of expertise with the subject and texts". (p 4)
The text also gives suggestions on how to approach Philosophy papers even though as a tutor, you may not have an expert knowledge of the content in front of you.
Now I could have just written out all of the suggestions the article presents but that would be too easy for you! Read the article, it's very helpful.
https://writinglabnewsletter.org/archives/v26/26.5.pdf
The article begins on page 1 of the January 2002 issue of Writing Lab Newsletter
My Philosophy background consists of Intro to Philosophy (taken three years ago) and Art Theory (which sometimes includes a wider range of philosophers) so when a student wants to make sure that they are fully answering their teacher's prompts and proving that they understand the content, I'm not very confident in helping them because I'm unfamiliar with most of the material.
So I researched tips and common trends in working with different disciplines and I found a really great article by a writing center group who studied their tutoring reports and found common trends amongst students with Literature, History, and Philosophy papers.
They found 2 major areas of concern for these assignments:
1. Understanding how students imagine they are addressing an assignment (What elements of the assignment are they addressing? How are they attempting to tailor their response to discipline specific demands? How is their knowledge of the subject shaping their response to the assignment?)
2. Understanding students' expectations regarding a tutor's knowledge across disciplines
In both Literature and History assignments the most common concerns the tutors found amongst their sessions were: organization, revision, and getting started. The most common difficulty stemmed from the writer's dependence on summarizing the text or historical facts. The article gives a couple strategies on how to help the student differentiate between summarizing and their own analyzing and interpreting.
Most relavent to my last few sessions, the article also discusses the difficulties in working with Philosophy assignments:
"We’ve seen a few who do provide some assignment guidelines, but students are so overwhelmed with the foreign nature and difficulty of the subject that they don’t make much use of them. We’ve also seen that, while tutors generally feel confident enough as writers to tackle philosophy tutorials, it is one area where tutors do express a certain frustration with their perceived lack of expertise with the subject and texts". (p 4)
The text also gives suggestions on how to approach Philosophy papers even though as a tutor, you may not have an expert knowledge of the content in front of you.
Now I could have just written out all of the suggestions the article presents but that would be too easy for you! Read the article, it's very helpful.
https://writinglabnewsletter.org/archives/v26/26.5.pdf
The article begins on page 1 of the January 2002 issue of Writing Lab Newsletter
Thanks for sharing these tips!
ReplyDeleteEven if you don't understand the content of the papers you are looking at, you can ask students to point out their thesis and the evidence to support it; a paragraph's topic sentence and supporting details; and where they've done the different things the prompt asks them to do.