Editor’s Note: This is the second in a two-part series from our Community Manager, Mal, about creating spaces and structures that validate and honor student difference. Here is a link to Part One: The Hope.

Because the thing we’re learning isn't ‘how to produce an essay’ or even necessarily ‘how to make an argument,’ but how to see the shapes of thoughts...

Anatomy of a Unit Plan

A few things matched up in quick succession upon noticing the issue with pacing.  One of them was how quickly it mapped to neurodivergent needs and accounted for executive dysfunction and hyperfocus - so the structure I want to build needs to be asynchronous and/or hybridized.  Things I used to think of as group activities are a little stickier now, either scheduled more carefully or else not at all, times turned into spaces.  Group communities if possible.  This could look something like moderating an internet community, a bit like social media groups?  A lot of this depends on how many kids even sign up to interact with the kinds of spaces I’m trying to build - I have no idea, none at all, whether this is going to look like a community of a hundred kids, or like individually tutoring half a dozen.  How do I plan for that?  What kinds of spaces can I create?  

And it is about spaces, not days, not a calendar of timed activities.  Usefully connected spaces.  That’s part of the value I’m hoping to bring to this endeavor - the ability to connect or coordinate thoughts or projects between kids who might never have met.  Now how do I balance that with the idea that many of them won’t be working on the same things along the same timeline - but could nevertheless be helpful to one another?  I've seen some professors half-successfully schedule group revision days for papers, only those revisions never get done and the papers are already finished products, and there’s never enough time in the class to discuss them even if anyone was going to retain that feedback.  

There are so many pieces of this which I haven’t put together yet; I don’t even know if I can until each specific scenario comes to pass.  The thing I’m realizing is if you believe in a linear, measured education then you can chart that path more or less objectively.  If you don’t, if you believe that learning is nonlinear - how much can you meaningfully prescribe in advance, and how much has to be reacting to what the learner brings to the table, and which directions they decide to go?

I thought for a long time about the idea of required texts. Now I’m wondering if we don’t tend to do that the wrong way around as well?  All the most potent learning I can think of, especially all the engagement of young adults, seems to come from them selecting the texts.  Isn’t that mostly how we learn things as adults, too?  We decide on the things we want to pursue and we use those things to define the shape of the learning.  Granted, this would seem to leave little room for finding new things, or for diversity and the discovery of pleasant surprises, things we didn’t know we would find valuable or enjoyable or interesting.  But I think there’s a lot of room for student-led education to bump into these things - for one, in a community of enthusiastic learners all sharing their different favorite things, it seems there would be more room for encouraging them to find all the different overlapping places.  More than in a classroom with one set text or one pre-written essay topic, for example.

What is this picture I’m trying to paint?  Digital, asynchronous media literacy and writing workshops for young adults, particularly (but not exclusively) neurodivergent young adults and others who don’t fit well into our current established structures.  Student-led communities, where I can build activities which hopefully appeal to a variety of kids and connect them across a variety of interests and levels of mastery.  Spaces I might be able to help coordinate and build up over years?  An online community they might be able to rely upon for years, with young adults becoming adults in the world without feeling, well, as disconnected as I did.  For too long.

Theory Into Praxis 

The trick is finding the place where the paint meets the canvas - it’s easy to dream up images and pick out the colors but how do we create these things?  How do you build communities in a world overwhelmed, drowning in pressures to join and engage and participate?  Demanding your attention.  You can’t draw up single disconnected activities in a void; they’ll get lost in that wild landscape.  I had an image of modules, or like tech trees in a game, or like those old Choose Your Own Adventure books!  Levels of progression with multiple paths!  Perhaps defined by an interest first and foremost, and seeing where that rabbithole leads!

What are, say, the desired learning outcomes of a nonlinear module exploring, let’s say, classic essay composition!  People always complain about that, right?  So the goal here is to understand the construction of a five-paragraph essay.  Not just to write one - I think for this, I frankly don’t care whether a finished essay is produced at all.  My goal here would be that students work with the pieces, can break down the pieces of one they read, even criticize it.  

Now, what kinds of activities and feedback can be designed into a module with an unknown number of students operating at different paces?  I want to craft spaces, threads of conversation where groups of varying sizes can spitball lists of topic ideas, and then later, maybe in the same groups or maybe in different ones, they take those ideas together and start coming up with lists of sources for them - don't even have to read them, just find them and list them out.  Reading and annotating can be a separate activity; the emphasis here is on component parts.  

Making this kind of space is notoriously difficult, especially as an older authority figure assigning tasks to younger, unskilled and often underconfident students.  Part of this might be mitigated by dissolving much of the hierarchical/authoritarian structure at the outset, but the type and frequency of feedback is going to be vital.  Since these workshops are not for grades and not on any kind of timeline or filling a quota for administrators, there should be no incentive for me ever to mass-produce vague or shallow replies - and since I’m not pushing them to complete a product on a deadline, I should be able to collaborate at their pace.  Not a boss but a co-worker, one with a little more experience.  I can ask questions more often than making judgments: What do you think of this way?  Why did you like this wording?  What is important to you?  What do you want to say?

These questions rarely end up on rubrics or in the red pen on an essay, in my experience, largely because they’re not justifiable as data points.  They’re not objective, concrete, or measurable.  They’re conversations.  They’re not even simple or binary enough to be a single question and answer, which utterly ruins the format of submitting products and receiving grades in return.  

If I’m very lucky (and a little bit clever) then these spaces will grow to contain students who ask one another these questions without as much of my prompting.  They’ll learn to have these conversations without needing me almost at all.  (And when they realize they don’t need me, that will be when they’re done with the unit, right?)

Times Turned Into Spaces

Concept Maps

Prewriting is never given much space in any classroom I’ve observed.  Half the time topics aren’t even brainstormed; they’re assigned, or picked out of a hat.  Nothing kills the momentum from square one better than assigning a topic and forcing a student to write an essay on it.  Which is arguably a valuable skill in higher education, but when the point is to learn how composition works then the topic itself is irrelevant.  The writer’s interest is relevant.  

The best way I can think to actually learn what prewriting looks like, structurally, is a concept map.  These were rarely ever mentioned in my own education, and when I have seen them they’re often just another graded checkmark of an assignment, immediately sublimated into a quick to-do list.  “Needs at least three branches and two colors.”  Done and done, and out of mind.  So how do I make it engaging?

For one thing, any number of thoughts or topics - early on, the more the better!  Ideally, introducing new learners to this space would be prefaced by some light conversation about interests - and finding a shared interest, a book or a tv show or maybe a game, we could walk through the making of a concept map together.  This would also serve as a tutorial in whichever software I end up using for this, if they want to use software - though any art program, or simply scribbles in a notebook, will also work just fine!  The important thing is having options to feel comfortable doodling.

I would love to get permission, over time, to keep a running gallery of concept maps made in this space, “decorating” the forum with examples of the thought processes of other learners.  (This might be a Discord channel with pinned maps, or a browser-based forum with clickable thumbnails for archived threads.)  

Feedback and conversations here will be centered on the texts chosen and how the thought process is represented - no more and no less.  Not caring whether any of these thoughts are viable papers yet.  We’re looking for the shapes of thoughts and how they connect to one another, how they organize, how quickly and enthusiastically they flow.  That is the whole of the thing.  

Thesis Statements

This is such a block for so many young writers, and it needn’t be!  So the task is simple.  Ideally (but not necessarily) it takes place after several concept maps have been made and can be referred to for inspiration.  Also ideally (but not necessarily, you see how this works) there will be groups sharing space and bouncing ideas off one another here - it would work better because of how a thesis statement is about having something to say, and it helps to have someone to say that to.  Technically I’m someone, but I don’t delude myself into thinking that teenagers are particularly enthusiastic about me as an audience.  

The exercise is one of the simplest, and encourages the most iterations: first, list as many things as you can think of that you feel you want to say to people.  If you can, put them into categories (opening thoughts for categories here are plain, uncomplicated - probably just Argument or Explanation).  If you don’t know where it goes, make a third column for discussion.  Each Argument or Explanation should be as short as you can make it.  After there’s a good list, I’ll ask for favorites, or ones the writer feels confident or knowledgeable about, or interested in.  Setting a few of those aside, we might return to concept mapping with those statements at the center, or we might just make lists of Reasons Why This Is Interesting To Read (which is remarkably similar to either a list of supporting points for an argument or a list of points outlining an explication).  Again, the focus is on playing with pieces of rhetoric and how they fit together.  The goal is to have a bunch of pieces to talk about, and instead of one-way feedback there is a two-way discussion mostly full of questions.  

Research and Annotation

My own memories of various teachers and professors and their definitions of “research” vary so wildly.  For some, it meant copying literally any sentence out of any book, or linking to anything that looked like a news article or came from a news site.  In retrospect, this explains a lot of internet discourse and people who don’t understand when they are or are not “doing their research.”  This section is the most potentially difficult to work through consistently, as it’s both the most dynamic/reactive to subject matter and to levels of facility or comprehension, while also being the most classically objective and academic.  How thick into the weeds of critical research we get is going to vary a lot, isn’t it?  As mentioned above, I’m thinking that there are two distinct activities here: collecting sources, and reading/annotating them.  

For the first part, we can pick either a concept map or (probably encouraged) a thesis statement from one of the completed activities above.  I think it might be important to keep some notes on ‘what I searched to find this, and where.’  So we start either a document or a thread, and begin a list of articles/songs/books/anything that looks like it might be relevant and useful and connected to that statement.  Each entry, then, should include (1) where to find this thing; (2) how I found this thing; (3) what makes me think it might be good to use, at a glance.  And that’s it.  I don’t even want to put a number on how many things - Goodheart’s Law, if there isn’t a quota then they won’t be doing the work with the number in mind and mistaking the number for the goal of the activity.

For the second part, we start just by reading the things and learning to make notes/ask questions. Part of my own process, which I may recommend, is typing out quotes into a document if I really like them or think they might end up in the essay.  If we have a concept map on hand for the thesis statement in question, I might recommend color-coding the quotes to the branches they apply to.  The principle here is that each step is its own activity - this activity isn’t just a formality for shoving into a paper later.  It’s about integrating new/external data and perspectives into a personal model of understanding - and with concept maps or similar illustrations, you can tangibly represent this process.  

For both parts, groups would be very welcome and beneficial (up to a dozen or so probably?) - and potential software could reflect that, perhaps working in Perusall or sharing a Google Doc if everyone’s comfortable with that.  This is always going to depend on how many brains are interacting at a given time, and whether their interests intersect.  

If all the parts are there and the young person in question is interested, this might be a good space to walk through what an annotated bibliography looks like - or heck, get a group of kids to work together to throw all sorts of annotated bibliographies together!  Even for essays or papers they may never map out or write, may never put together beyond collecting and organizing sources and commenting on them.  I wonder how often anyone would be interested in something like taking an article or a video essay and then reconstructing a bibliography out of it?  That’s a great way to start talking about Commentary as a format.

The Shapes of an Essay

The thing about this entire conceptual framework is that it’s easy to find places to bring threads together, but difficult to conclude.  Traditional writing education is very concerned with conclusions because conclusions mean finished products, checked boxes, discrete metrics to be measured and graded by standardized standards.  And maybe this is just the autism talking, but it feels like I’ve never in my life learned by way of a straight line; I learn in circles and processes.  If I’m not mistaken, a lot of folks do (maybe most or all of us, I can’t really presume).  It’s part of how I wrote this piece, right?  Big circles spiraling down to smaller circles, ideas for modules overlapping in places but never demanding a strict sequence or timeline.  They can be done in any order, and abandoned at any point when interest is lost.  They can be repeated a dozen times to better understand the shape of a single process or component, without ever having to become an essay or a paper.   In fact they work better when abandoned and repeated.

You can see why I wouldn’t make a very good schoolteacher - I’ve designed all these spaces without being able to assure a single parent or administrator of how long a given child will spend in any of them, and then written a piece about them with no concrete conclusion!  (Apologies to anyone who thinks in straight lines; reading this mess must be maddening.)  A child cannot “finish” this unit.  At every step, my intention is to stress that there is no set final product to be graded.  That’s not the point.  They can only walk through the circles like a garden labyrinth until they are comfortable or confident in their understanding of the parts and how they fit together.

“Putting it together” here might mean assembling a whole essay or it might mean assembling a coherent concept map with only the pieces they intend to use, or it might mean having most of an idea and picking just one section to flesh out and incorporate citations into.  Or for some brains, maybe it means coming at it backwards and taking apart someone else’s completed essay (either a sample one or a peer) and then mapping it out using the other sections.  

A lot of it is going to rely on what’s been working so far - if concept maps are really working for someone, then start there!  Maybe even physically printing out an essay and cutting the pieces of it up and pasting them onto a physical map, if that’s what needs to happen.  In fact, any of these activities could benefit from color-coding and rearranging of pieces, as well as cross-posting those pieces into each other’s formats. 

Because the thing we’re learning isn't ‘how to produce an essay’ or even necessarily ‘how to make an argument,’ but how to see the shapes of thoughts.  This is a skill that can be applied to more than just a formulaic five-paragraph argumentative essay but anything you might want to communicate, in whatever shape makes it make sense!  It’s transferable to media literacy and close reading, as well as useful to metacognition and self-reflection!  Especially if there’s a community process here, with peers and dialogue and multiple topics with multiple perspectives.  That’s the dream, right?  This can all be done with one person and individual tutoring sessions - but it really comes alive as a social space!  Workshopping together, even collaborating on writing; I don’t want any kid in this community to ever feel that agonizing isolation of sitting at home, staring at a blank screen the night before some arbitrary deadline.  There’s nothing less like learning than that, is there?

There’s no real end to the number of interconnected spaces that could be built in this way - my deconstructed essay workshop here could comfortably connect to any number of book clubs and media analysis/discussion spaces, which might connect to some tabletop rpg and collaborative creative writing spaces, which could easily include spaces for historical exploration and social studies.  Imagine a sprawling multiplayer written roleplaying game where the players are time-travelers stranded across different periods and events, trying to chase down some villains intent on manipulating history to their advantage!  

That’s the thing about process over product! If you understand the pieces; you understand the whole.  And a teacher will learn this in the designing, the exact same way that a student learns it in the activity.  At the same time that any given child or young adult is learning how to make a concept map to describe the shapes of their thoughts, we are learning how to map out the space in the middle of the Venn diagram between us and them.  A process can be collaborative and dynamic in ways that a prescribed product never can be.  ‍