Conducting interviews - animating a controversy

This assignment is designed for lower level/intermediate rhetoric and writing classrooms. Its aim is to get students to think of the controversies they are working on as ongoing discussions with real life consequences rather than in abstract academic terms. It also introduces them to the concept of doing (light-weight) original research.

Students are assigned an opinion article related to the course topic as homework, from which they extract key claims and develop interview questions. Since this assignment is designed as a group project and students will benefit from a shared base for comparison when results are presented, I would not let each student work on their own articles. But this depends in part on the point in the semester at which the exercise is done. At some point towards the end, at least in my classes, students will have their own, quite specific research interests. By that time it might make sense to divide students into groups according to overlapping interests and let them work more freely. Depending on the technology available to you, it may be important to make sure that each group has at least one member with a mobile phone that can do audiovisual recordings.

For the first 15 minutes of class time, students get together in groups and design an interview questionnaire as they discuss their understanding of the assigned material. They should also talk about how to conduct interviews: will they have one person who will consistently be the interviewee and another one or two who will record, or do they want to switch roles? Finally, they should think about what kind of people they want to interview (only a certain age group, gender, only people from Texas, etc.) depending on the controversy at hand.

Students then get between 30 to 45 minutes to find interviewees and conduct their surveys. You may want to give them an area in which they are allowed to find interviewees if you don't want them wandering off too far. And it may be a good idea to be present in the general area to keep an eye on your different groups.

There will not be enough time to present each group's results in the same class period, but a quick de-briefing is a good idea. Ask students to talk about the questions people had most to say on and the ones for which it was most difficult to elicit a response. Did they identify any general trends in their interviewees' answers?

As a homework assignment, ask each group to condense their material and prepare a quick (2 min.) presentation on it. Depending on when in the semester the exercise is done, the presentations can be used as a springboard to discuss different stakeholders, audiences, or to talk about developing arguments from the interview materials