Tough debate in asynchronous environments

Here's nothing new: It can be tough finding common ground with people nowadays. (Hopefully Thanksgiving last week wasn't yet another proof of that for you.)

With bad models from Facebook to cable news to the holiday dinner table, where can our writing students refine the ability to have reasoned debate? A bloodless course paper with no real audience (i.e., writing for the teacher only) isn't the best platform. In-class, face-to-face discussions about sensitive topics can fall flat, even in the hands of skilled teacher-moderators; outrage is possible, but silence and hesitancy are more likely.

I was thinking about how students are skilled in digital communication, mainly through social media, but how seldom they have "curated" or moderated debates in such modalities. This thinking, coupled with my preparations for my winter asynchronous first-year argumentative writing course, led me back to a familiar place: Asynchronous discussion forums.

I wondered if those common, humble forums, in the context of a course, could be especially productive places to practice tough debate. 

I've said in the past that teachers are often intimidated by students' digital experience and fluency, and, yep, they are social media wizards. But they come to us often never having had an academically/pedagogically moderated argument in writing in which they had to articulate carefully points and perspectives. They seldom write in in-depth conversations.

This week, as we are concluding our course The Peer Reader in Context (a writing-intensive course taken primarily but not solely for potential Drexel Writing Center tutors), my students and I read "Interactional dynamics in on-line and face-to-face peer-tutoring sessions for second language writers" (1). In this Journal of Second Language Writing article, the authors reviewed transcripts of face-to-face and online tutoring sessions in second language contexts and discovered, surprisingly (especially in 2006), that it was the face-to-face sessions that seemed "to lend themselves to more hierarchal relationships in which tutors take control of the discourse" while "on-line interactions" appeared "to lead to more egalitarian relationships, with clients controlling the discourse more."

Why am I mentioning this article? Because in emphasizing that students may feel more at home on their own "turf" online, I thought that students' general digital familiarity coupled with a teacher-moderator creates a learning space in which students debate tough topics respectfully, thoughtfully, and in writing.

In previous first-year asynchronous argumentative writing courses, I would introduce at least one real hot-button topic thread during the term. It wasn't a mandatory thread, so students who didn't want to discuss that topic didn't have to. But now, when perhaps cultural temperatures are higher, I may use these forums more frequently as a renewed way to find our way into dialogue.

Note:

1) By Rodney H. Jones, Angela Garralda, David C.S. Li, and Graham Lock. Published in the volume 15 issue on pp. 1-23.