Teaching Academic Writing Skills Through Film Soundtracks
Writing can be a daunting task for even the most intrepid and experienced author. For first-year college students, writing a college research paper can feel like being thrown into the deep end. At the University of Texas, Music Professor Jim Buhler teaches first-year students how to wade step-by-step into the waters of academic writing and navigate the process with confidence.
When Professor Buhler talks about his Introduction to Music and Film Sound class, you can hear his passion for teaching the history and methods of using music in films. But, one of his main goals is to teach students how to do independent research, analysis and writing at the college level. Throughout the course, Professor Buhler guides the students through writing a critical research paper by giving them a structured writing process and discussion groups where they can explore their ideas and get feedback.
Professor Buhler breaks down their final paper into several assignments to help the students focus on developing higher level writing and research skills. He teaches the students the best practices of writing a research paper, from deciding which film to write about, to finding sources, and writing scene analysis. Instead of assuming the students are familiar with scholarly articles, he shows them how to take a source, analyze it, and determine how it speaks to their paper. He hopes that the research methods and analytical tools he gives them can apply to research in other disciplines.
Although the majority of his students won’t become Music majors, he intends this process to serve as a model that students can return to when they write research papers in other disciplines in the future. Knowing how to break down a large paper into smaller more manageable parts is not just a valuable writing skill, it also helps his students overcome writing anxiety and build confidence in their research and analytical abilities.
In addition to learning how to structure their writing processes, Professor Buhler also helps his students develop the analytic skills to identify themes and build arguments. He was surprised that a majority of his students couldn’t identify the main themes of the movies they watched. He finds that often the root cause of muddled writing is a weak grasp of the themes the students try to identify. Once the students can identify the main themes and key supporting details, the rest of their writing improves.
To help the students develop those skills, Professor Buhler assigns them to discussion groups where they brainstorm about themes in the films and their research papers. In these groups, the students also peer-review each other’s papers, present research, and discuss themes. He has seen some of the biggest improvements in the students’ writing due to more group projects and peer feedback. “The students’ final papers get better because they see what their peers are working on at a detailed level,” Buhler says. Talking to other students about similar projects especially helps the students see details or connections that they may have missed.
The discussion groups also help the students sift through the details from the movies and identify which were key to understanding the overall themes. Professor Buhler shows them examples to help them understand how to connect specific details to larger arguments. Then in their groups, the students apply those techniques to pick out details from the music and relate them to broader themes.
Although Professor Buhler realizes that some students may find this process tedious or limit their creativity, he argues that, “if you give the students too much openness early on, they don’t know what to do, where to start.” His class gives them a starting framework for how to approach research and writing in college. His hope is that by learning these skills early on students will continue to use and build on them their future academic and professional careers.
If you would like to know more about the Flags program at UT Austin, you can find this information here.
If you are a professor at UT, you can find resources to help teach the Writing Flag here. We also provide resources and ideas to help you teach each of the other Flags here
By Abby Attia, Graduate Assistant for CSEF
