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Writes Professor Richard Murphy:

When teaching first-year writing, I assume that students have been indoctrinated by family, religion, schooling, and pop culture, so I try to give them new language to see the world. Through various short readings I introduce what I call lenses for them to use to write about art.

Each of the four papers that students write on art has at least one lens to assist them in seeing differently and writing with a new perspective. For instance, when writing about Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus,” I often have them read Walter Benjamin for his interpretation of the image. In addition, over the course of the semester I introduce them to what thinkers have written about the idea of struggle. I do this because their last paper assignment, a short research paper, will include the idea struggle, and I want them to include one of the concepts/definitions or struggle as a major focus of the paper. By the end of the semester they will have been introduced to struggle as Heidegger, Camus, Bauman, Benjamin, Nietzsche, and Zizek have understood it.

What my focus on concepts as lenses produces in their writing has always surprised me and has kept me interested in student writing.

Below is an example of a student using the male and female gaze to interpret one of Alice Neel’s couch paintings. What strikes me about this thesis and outline of arguments is the promise it makes for the rest of the paper:

“By examining each character, it can be interpreted that Neel represents the quintessential male position – the one of apathy and laziness – in her 1972 painting “Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews.” Benny lounges and mopes, while his wife sits upright; apologetic.”

The student is separating this couple and coming to an understanding of each of the postures. And I couldn’t wait to read what the writer wrote about “apologetic.”

The second student example is from the research paper assignment. The writer uses Zygmunt Bauman’s idea (borrowed from Goethe) that life is one of days of struggle with here and there a sunny day, a sunny day from satisfaction in resolution of a struggle or a segment of one. When writing the research paper students are asked to include work of theirs from a foundation course or something they are doing outside of the classroom.

“After stepping back from my nearly finished drawing, however, I realized that I allowed my perfectionism to take over. I became far too fixated on the naturalistic representation of the drapery and lost any sense of gesture or movement. Although “life-like,” I created something that felt stiff and void of feeling.”

Later in the paper, the writer attempts a wonderful way to embrace a perceived fault.

“When you think about it, perfectionism implies a few admirable qualities in itself: hard work and perseverance. Ironically, one solution to my struggle could be using these admirable qualities in the right amounts, having a positive outlook and starting anew.”

I think of these two examples, of many I could have used, as the fruits of student labor, their struggles in first-year writing. It makes my work reading these papers rewarding while I am hopeful that they are learning to engage ideas with thinking and to develop perspectival habits in their lives and in their writing.