Joseph Harris offers a new and refreshing look at the ways that we look at texts, especially in the way we use them in our writing as intellectuals. Harris manages to give good advise and good examples of ways that we can do this, and uses language that is accessible to our students. I have tried to teach my students the difference between merely summarizing a text and using it to prove a point of view with very limited success. In just a few pages, Harris was able not only to do this difficult job for me, but also to point to things that I was ignoring when looking at my own use of others’ texts in my own writing.
One thing I found particularly useful was Harris’s ability to ignore the specific words of the thesis and go directly to finding the “project” that the author is working on. What is more important than a thesis to Harris (what is said), is what the author is trying to do with a piece of writing, and understanding an author’s “aims,” “methods,” and “materials” will better help get to the root of a text than attempting to summarize through finding a thesis statement.
Harris also articulated some of the things I had internalized and so no longer paid attention to. As such, I could not point these things out to my students. These were that the use of paraphrases and quotes is not to give background on a subject or story (under most circumstances the thing you are citing has already been read by your audience) but rather you should “quote only those phrases or passages that you want to do further work with or bring pressure upon––whose particular implications and resonances you want to analyze, elaborate, counter, revise, echo, or transform.” In other words, only write on a subject if there is something particular to your point of view that is new and interesting, and only quote the texts of others as they pertain to your particular way of looking at this subject. Looking at texts from Harris’s point of view, and being able to identify all the things in my own writing habits that I had internalized allowed me to see the strengths and weaknesses in my teaching of writing and the ways to improve my method of instruction for my students.
Despite the insight that I have gained looking at my own teaching methods through the lens that Harris provides, I am looking forward to observing other classroom environments from a perspective outside that of teacher or student. Carolyn Frank’s discussion of note-taking and note-making and the techniques she lays out in her chapter “An Ethnographic Perspective,” has given me some insight and tools to work with when I step into the role of observer and rather than feeling out of my element, I am looking forward to the experience of the classroom from outside the teacher-student paradigm. Stepping outside this paradigm will allow me to witness these interactions without feeling the inevitable stress of expectation inherent in the teacher-student dynamic and relax into a third, ‘off-center’ perspective. I don’t know what I will learn from this experience, but rather than being nervous, I am excited by the opportunity to use my observations to improve my own teaching methods.