Things That Work: Framing

Framing and Making Connections
I had an English 100 class that had lots of trouble "making connections." They all wrote paragraphs that included discussion of two writers, but they were very few substantive connections between the ideas of different writers. In desperation, I tried this exercise:

Choose one of the sentences below as a starting place. Fill in the first black with a specific incident or idea from Baldwin's essay, and fill in the second blank with a specific concept that is important in Bellah's essay. Then continue writing until you have at least 200 words explaining the connection you have made.

1. James Baldwin's experience of _______________ is a good example of Robert Bellah's concept of _____________ because…

2. James Baldwin's experience of _______________ is a poor example of Robert Bellah's concept of _____________ because…

I was concerned that this exercise would lead to a simplistic, constraining notion of framing because it seemed so reductive and mechanistic. However, it proved extremely productive, and was the turning point for most of the students in the class. While I had worried that these sentences would appear in papers exactly as I had presented them, instead students used the exercise to develop the skill of "framing," and quickly moved beyond the simple model provided by the exercise.
I devised this exercised as an attempted to help students make substantive connections between ideas; however, I was pleased to discover that the "fill in the blank" format was also useful for working with quotations. Most of the students in this class were already fairly skillful at the mechanics of quoting. However, this exercise helped those who had not acquired that skill to practice it, and also helped everyone to make more meaningful use of quotation.

-- Carol Denise Bork

Writing in Class and Presenting New Texts
I find that the best way to begin a discussion is with student writing. Whenever I introduce the third essay into a sequence. I bring to class a page of three quotations, one from each author. I have students write on the first quote for 10 minutes. Then, I tell them to frame the second quote in terms of the first quote and write for 10 more minutes. For the final 10 minutes, I have them frame the third quote (which is relatively or completely new to them) in terms of the first two. Then, each student reads a portion of his or her writing to the class.
By taking the passages out of context, I encourage the students to close-read and make connections between them. Once they have made these initial connections, the larger essays do not seem as intimidating. In addition, it's important for them to see the ways we frame passages in creating their assignments.
I think that this method works best when you pick particularly difficult passages, or those which highlight major disagreements between two or three writers. When I choose the more difficult passages, I find that students have more to discuss after they write than they do if I choose passages which offer explicit connections between them. Here is an example of three passages I chose this semester. The responses I received from my students led to an engaged discussion in which many students participated.

The educated man is the adapted man, because he is better 'fit' for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well men fit the world the oppressors have created and how little they question it (Freire 539).

What is the place of unsolicited oppositional discourse, parody, resistance, critique in the imagined classroom community? Are teachers supposed to feel that their teaching has been most successful when they have eliminated such things and unified the social world, probably in their own image? Who wins when we do that? Who loses? (Pratt 539)

Radical educationalists meanwhile complain that ghetto schools 'oppress' students by trying to mold them, stifling native characteristics. The truer critique would be in reverse: not that schools change ghetto students too much, but that while they might promote the occasional scholarship student, they change most students barely at all (Rodriguez 582).

-- Christine A. Cerrato