James Pontuso and American Government

Overall grades in the collaborative American Government class improved by almost a standard deviation above the norm, and term paper grades advanced by more than a standard deviation above the norm. To determine the effectiveness of the collaborative-teaching experiment, we averaged the mean GPA of all Pontuso's American Government classes (2.1 GPA) over a 10-year period (20 classes) against the GPA of the collaboratively-taught course (2.86 GPA). Pontuso also taught a second section of American Government (2.09 GPA) and was able to compare the work in each class directly.

We did not directly interview students in the collaboratively taught classes to discover which factors led them to greater success than past students in American Government, but we did gather anecdotal comments that indicate the greater time and effort exerted on writing assignments enhanced student comprehension in both classes. Student evaluations of my American Government class showed that overall student satisfaction with the course was greater than students in the control group.

We will focus on one writing assignment to explore how the collaborative method resulted in better student papers. In the third week of the semester students in American Government were asked to write a two- to three-page term paper on the following topic:

Although this assignment may seem rudimentary, students in American Government often have difficulty writing successful papers on this topic. I have found that students encounter a number of barriers in comprehending American Government overall and Madison in particular.

Rhetoric and Rosalind Warfield-Brown

Among the many possible ways to design Rhetoric class—freshman composition—one is to teach the “modes” of essay development. Many popular composition texts emphasize these basic patterns of organization: definition, classification, cause and effect, process, comparison and contrast, description, etc.

I have never had much luck with this approach to teaching writing because the standard topics students choose—“how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich” for a process topic, “the meaning of courage,” for definition, and so on—can be banal or overly broad. While the exercises may give students a few basic strategies for organization, or may encourage them to write about something they feel comfortable with, in the long run, as a means of introducing first-year college students to academic writing, the modes have not worked very well in my classes.

That is, until I paired my Rhetoric class with American Government class for the first time in the fall semester of 1996. In the first few weeks of that class, as students focused on the difficult diction and convoluted reasoning of James Madison's Federalist #10, it suddenly became important that students know how to define words: they needed to understand the very fine distinctions between, for example, “democracy” as they understand it and the “pure democracy” and “republic” of Madison's treatise. They needed to compare his world with theirs. And they especially needed to understand his analysis of causes and effects.

And so the class began the semester with the text in front of us and with writing assignments to be done: how does Madison define democracy? (definition) What is the difference, in his view, between a democracy and a republic? (compare and contrast) Why does he believe a democracy is ultimately unsuccessful, and a large republic the best type of government for the new nation? (analysis) And so it went, close reading of a text—unusual in most first-semester writing classes—and careful thinking about what the text says, thinking aided by daily in-class writing.

On the first day of every semester I read students E. M. Forester's observation about writing: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” As much as I exhort students to avoid clichés and old saws in their own writing and classroom presentations, I cannot resist trotting out Forester's question, because it embodies what I am trying to teach.

Students did not have formed opinions on the topic. They gained an informed opinion about an issue—say, Federalist #10 —by writing about it and then examining what they had written, rewriting it after discussions with their classmates in Rhetoric and American Government, doing some limited research, and then writing about it again, perhaps from a slightly different perspective, perhaps with an entirely opposite slant.

The Rhetoric class that I taught collaboratively with James Pontuso's American Government class was one of my most successful in 16 years at Hampden-Sydney College. What I learned from the class has informed my introductory writing classes since. The class taught me how far students can be stretched—how, despite their bewilderment in the face of academic reading and writing, they take on and make sense of what seem like daunting works of literature and history and through careful reading and writing explore the texts' meanings and implications for their own lives.

When the students had parsed Madison's meaning by analyzing his discrete definitions, untangled his contorted reasoning by contrasting their understanding of factions and minorities and “majority tyranny” with his, and finally came to see the logic of his argument, eureka! They wanted to write arguments of their own.

Traditionally, the more complicated task of framing and supporting arguments, a higher-level thinking skill often undeveloped in males before the age of 23 (Hampden-Sydney College is one of the last all-male schools), is usually not part of writing classes before the second semester of the first year at the earliest. In fact, at Hampden-Sydney argumentation is the focus of the second semester writing course. However, after completing the collaboratively taught Rhetoric course, students were not only ready to undertake the task of writing arguments; they were eager and believed they were capable of writing complex papers, because they had just carefully studied a complex argument in Federalist #10.

And so, by the middle of the first semester, students in my Rhetoric class were ready to start writing arguments of their own. They wanted to argue with Madison and with each other about Madison's claims, drawing on their own experiences as citizens, not the people of the fledgling republic whom Madison was trying to persuade, but as citizens of the powerful 21stcentury republic that he and his brilliant cohorts had made possible. Students easily conjured examples of tyranny in their own lives—some thought of high school cliques, others of authoritarian administrations. A few students questioned (helped by our readings of Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart as our parallel text in the course) some of the arguments Madison accepts so easily—that a representative democracy will control the power of the propertied classes, for example. Since many Hampden-Sydney students represent the propertied class, they were mystified by Madison's assertion: “The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.” At age 18 or 19 they have rarely had occasion to examine their class position or many of the other basic assumptions of their lives.

During that semester, our discussions moved from factions to questions of self-reliance and community spirit and finally to the question of virtue. Madison said, “If there be no virtue among us, no form of government can render us secure. To suppose any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”

So from the apparently sterile, dry—the students might say “tedious”—exercise at the beginning of the semester, of reading carefully and writing thoughtfully about what seemed at first an antiquated and weirdly written document, students in Rhetoric 101 finally reached the place where all writing begins. They began to see that, in addition to being a skill needed to succeed in the academy, writing can be a way to examine their own hearts and lives, a way to analyze the modern complicated world of factions and strife in which they live, and a way of thinking about their responses and their responsibilities to that world. Hampden-Sydney's mission is “to form good men and good citizens in an atmosphere of sound learning,” and that is what we tried to do. With James Madison's help we think we had a little more success than usual.

For my own teaching, the collaborative course taught me that serious texts such as The Iliad, Frankenstein, Emma, and The Red Badge of Courage can be used even in first-year writing classes and are excellent prompts not only for academic essays but also for writing about important personal issues. Although I have not found the “modes” method to be successful, thanks to Federalist #10 I have discovered again how to make important texts serve the cause of teaching clear writing and clear thinking.