Eksperiment

Yesterday in the literary seminar I'm teaching this term I presented a full-on conference paper exactly as I would do it at a real conference. It was an experiment in teaching the culture of academic discourse in the humanities, rather than just the content. I gave the students a listening exercise to work on while I presented, which was intended to help guide them through the paper. It has the following instructions and questions:

In this exercise you will listen to a fairly typical conference paper presentation and attempt to sort out what the argument is based solely on listening (rather than reading). This is exceedingly difficult to do, yet it is the standard format for presenting research in the humanities. (Is that a good thing?)

1. You will need to come up with at least one question to ask the presenter about the content of the paper. Write that question (or those questions) here as it (they) occur to you during the presentation. At the end of the presentation, pose it (them)!
2. What is the thesis for this presentation (what is the problem to be analyzed)? Does the presenter state the thesis outright, or did you just have to infer it? (And in the end, did the presenter actually analyze what she said she was going to analyze?)
3. List the key points that the presenter makes. There should be some. If not, it is a weak paper! There shouldn't be too many, though. Hope for about 3-5.
4. Does the presenter make use of specific theoretical terms or specific theories? If so what are they, and do they work to support the argument being made? Would something else that you know of have worked better?
5. Does the visual material presented help or hinder your understanding of the paper?

Wow. I have never had such an attentive audience at a conference presentation, and I have never had so many questions and comments. The post-paper discussion was really interesting because we focused both on the content of the paper and on the process of presenting. Since this is a split senior/graduate seminar, there were graduate students in the group who may well be presenting papers in the next year or so. As far as I can tell we don't give them any specific training in how to do that at this university, which is why I subjected them to my own research (on a text they had to read for my class). For me it was delightful to know that the audience had read nearly every thing I referenced in the paper, including the theory bits. I would definitely do this again in the future, at least with graduate students. I wonder if other people have done a similar exercise?

And, in other news, a holiday confession: KE and I browbeat my mother into agreeing to have our Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant! I am so utterly relieved. This will be the first time in my entire life that I don't have a home-cooked meal on Thanksgiving, but I just didn't have it in me this year to prepare one. There was just too much else to be thinking about and doing. KE is delighted, and I'm looking forward to being able to either A) trash the restaurant food or B) learn some new dishes and traditions to encorporate in my own Thanksgiving meals (I presume I'll go back to making Thanksgiving dinner starting next year).

Update: The restaurant dinner was fantastic! We ate at Sweetwaters on the Willamette river, then took a short walk along the river after. Wow, I didn't realize what a breeze it is to do a restaurant Thanksgiving! And the best thing of all was that I got to wear my finished (finally!!) rillejakke:

Yay, yay, and double yay! Boy was I tired of that project...