“‘Goldiloxxing’ Intellectual Participation: Getting it ‘Just Right’” 

Genevieve Critel sought to define the elusive concept of “participation,” and when her colleagues took up her mantle, they continued to investigate different interpretations of this term. One exploration led Kelly Bradbury and Paul Muhlhauser to another topoi, or commonplace of participation: intellectualism.

Bradbury and Muhlhauser further Critel’s study of participation by investigating this new topoi of intellectualism by studying what instructors, themselves, consider and perceive to be “intellectual participation” in their students. They conduct a survey full of open-ended questions and, in this chapter of “The Rhetoric of Participation: Interrogating Commonplaces In and Beyond the Classroom,” Bradbury and Muhlhauser provide a broad overview of what writing instructors think of when they’re asked to describe what “intellectual participation” looks like, sounds like, and feels like. 

Their survey purposefully leaves the term “intellectual,” ambiguous, in hopes of teasing out some unified sense of what “intellectual participation” looks like, sounds like, and feels like in their students and in their classrooms.  Coining the term ‘Goldiloxxing’ to describe this study, they describe that “Goldiloxxing” intellectual participation in a writing classroom means getting students to perform what their instructors have decided is a ‘just-right’ demonstration of intellectual participation: “to look, sound, and create a feeling of intellectual participation in the classroom,” (Goldilocks Effect). 

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Is this fair, though? In their work, Bradbury and Muhlhauser compile a number of agreed-upon conventions that instructors provide to describe how they assess intellectual participation in the categories of “looks like,” “sounds like,” and “feels like.” Admittedly, they do leave space in each section of their research to acknowledge the outliers– the students who don’t “look,” “sound,” and likely “feel” like they are intellectually participating– and they nod to the fact that these students’ lack of observable characteristics of “intellectual participation,” does not mean they’re not participating intellectually.

However, I don’t think Bradbury and Muhlhauser provide a balanced picture of the situation of intellectual participation: in examining the feedback they received and included in their chapter, “Goldiloxxing Intellectual Participation: Getting it ‘Just Right,’” it’s evidently obvious that this data dangerously omits the opinions of the students– the participators in question. 

 

Intellectual Participation “Looks Like”

• “…’students have to invest some portion of their intellect: interest, curiosity, desire to learn or grow or change or reflect’” (Chinchilla, “Looks Like”) 
• “…’I spell this out for my students on the syllabus, and we discuss engagement in class. They know that I am expecting professional behavior, professional body language, physical attentiveness, meaningful contributions to discussions, and attendance. I ask students, also, to learn each others names, make eye contact with each other, and shift their focus from me whenever possible…’” (Caribou, “Assessment”) 

 

Intellectual Participation “Sounds Like”

• “…’intellectual participation sounds like the hush of writing, alternating with the breathed silence of attentive listening, with occasional laughter and cross conversation, often leading to a fully engaged exchange’” (Serval, “Sounds Like”)
• “…’I listen for signs of engagement with the readings and engagement with the actual discussion. I gauge, to the extent I can, whether the student is actually participating in an exchange of views or whether he/she is just talking to hear himself/herself talk. If a student’s comments further the discussion and further the group’s understanding, then that’s intellectual participation.’” (Mongoose, “Assessment”)

 

Intellectual Participation “Feels Like”

• “…’both intellectually and emotionally exciting for students and instructors…’” (Ocelot, “Feels Like”) 
• “…’when students have the ‘Ah-HA!’ moment.’” (Cavy, “Feels Like”)

 

Not-So-Happily Ever After

A number of quick criticisms come to mind skimming through these few comments–

• What if instructors aren’t inspiring interest, curiosity, and desire to learn or grow, and are instead contributing to plummeting self-esteem all around, and a general decline in academia? 
• You (Caribou) ask your students to shift their focus from you to their peers whenever possible, yet you impose an explicitly structured idea of the ‘right way to participate’ in your classroom, so can they ever truly put you and your required performativity out of mind? 
• How do students know when to dispel the hush of writing and begin to laugh and converse, are you (Serval) deciding that, too? 

 

Etc.; as student and instructor, I recognize the need to assess participation in order to encourage it, while simultaneously rebelling against this notion of a “just-right” look, sound, and feel. 

I appreciate Bradbury and Muhlhauser’s suggestion, that “the actions we associate with intellectual participation” are perhaps “teacher centered,” and that “our assessments of students as successful may foster the performance of intellectual participation more than cultivate genuine intellectual participation among students,” (Final Feelings). Unfortunately, I think the form through which they make this argument emphasizes the opinions and perceptions of writing instructors, while subordinating the “outlier” cases and caveats to “Goldiloxxing” participation as an area of study. On the other hand, this is cleverly reflective of a potential systemic issue in pedagogy, wherein the opinions and perceptions of writing instructors, when it comes to the way their students participate, is privileged over those opinions and perceptions of the students themselves. 

 

It’s Alright if it’s Not “Just Right”

“Goldiloxxing” intellectual participation is perhaps a useful tool in pointing out a common Achilles’ heel, so to speak, among writing instructors. I think we’re so quick to challenge ourselves to fix our curriculum, and we must, on some level, believe that our students’ lack of engagement and participation is due in part to our own inability to engage them; otherwise, why would so many of the research participants in this study be centering themselves and their own perceptions in their responses? We know what intellectual participation looks like because we have an end-goal in mind; we want all of our students to look, sound, but most importantly feel like intellectual participants. We, as instructors, want to give students the answers for how to succeed; if we can define intellectual participation, we can help them to become intellectual participants, right?

I only wonder how much better and more effective our classrooms would be if we could decide on an individual basis, what intellectual participation “looks like, sounds like, and feels like.” What if our students are given the chance to define, “just right,” for themselves? Even a classroom-wide, agreed-upon strategy implanted into our syllabi is inefficient at capturing the nuances of our individual students. Sure, it’s still not a perfect solution; we should, however, continue thinking of ways to put our students into the “design process” of their own experience in our course. In our effort to help them find their “just-right” way of intellectually participating, we certainly don’t want to scare them away from trying at all.