Author Meets Critics: Learning through scholarly conversation

Abstract

Scholarship as a conversation is a particularly useful metaphor for encouraging active learning among university students. This article suggests one way to move beyond the metaphor, by enabling conversation between students and established scholars. After contextualizing the idea of scholarship as a conversation within broader learning metaphors, I introduce an exercise called Author Meets Critics. I explain the exercise procedure and analyze more than 100 questions asked by students in six iterations conducted in universities in both North America and Southeast Asia. I analyze five categories of student questions that emerged from the exercise and discuss each category with respect to the idea of scholarship as conversation. I conclude that the exercise provides a unique opportunity to not only interrogate the work in question, but also recognize authors as socially embedded actors with the same joys and challenges as students when it comes to scholarship. Through the exercise, students gain a sense of camaraderie with authors and each other with regard to learning, as they experience the opening of infinite tangents to the conversation. The exercise thus fosters deeper learning, self-reflection, and improved communication skills, both with classmates and scholars.