Franziska Tsufim
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
Writing classes routinely ask students to engage in a lengthy process of drafting and revising their work. As instructors, we emphasize to students the need to “fail” (Carr), call “shitty first drafts” messy yet generative (Lamott) and position these ideas as “writing thresholds” (Adler-Kassner & Wardle). At the same time, first-year students are often slow to buy into our calls to “trust the process” (Lamott, 94). After all, Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle remind us that the encounter with threshold concepts routinely involves discomfort and even rejection. In fact, students often approach writing as a “one-and-done” endeavor that leaves little room for imperfection. This presents us with a mismatch regarding students’ actual writing practices and the failure-embracing process we would like them to adopt. This activity addresses this gap through a timed making challenge in which students use basic crafting supplies to respond spur-of-the-moment to a problem in their lives, big or small. After that, they complete a reflective activity in the form of a tinkering log, in which they contextualize their experience with Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts,” and Collin Brooke’s and Allison Carr’s “Failure Can be an Important Part of Writing Development.” By tasking students with making something by hand under time pressure, the activity pushes them out of their comfort zone, confronts them with possible perfectionism, and invites them to experience the generative potential of “shittiness” and “failure.” In this way, the activity engages threshold concepts of writing not only cognitively but pre-textually, as embodied knowledge that can inform future writing practices. For this reason, it is particularly suitable for lessons early in the semester when students first encounter process pedagogy. The preferred location for this activity is an on-campus makerspace for its broad access to different types of supplies and the makerspace’s position as creative third space outside the evaluative pressure of the traditional classroom. In the absence of access to a makerspace, the activity can easily be implemented in any classroom with basic crafting materials.