Blue Books Reimagined

Turning a surveillance tool into a space for creativity, reflection, and self-discovery

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The Important Work is a space for writing instructors at all levels—high school, college, and beyond—to share reflections about teaching writing in the era of generative AI.

This week’s post is by Danielle Kane and Claire Mason. Danielle Kane is Assistant Professor of Sociology and a fellow in the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program at Purdue University. She has taught in writing programs at Duke and Penn, and her work in the scholarship of teaching and learning has appeared in Teaching Sociology, the Writing Center Journal, and The Handbook of Teaching and Learning in Sociology.

Claire Mason is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program at Purdue University. Her research focuses on meaning making, participation, and audience agency. You can find her online at ClaireElizabethMason.com

If you’re interested in sharing a reflection for The Important Work, you can find all the information here. —Jane Rosenzweig

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Last fall, as student use of AI came to feel inevitable, I decided I needed to learn how to work with it. In my discussion-based, general education course—designed to introduce mostly STEM students to literature and philosophy—I had always assigned short responses to readings as homework. That semester, I allowed them to use AI to draft their responses.

It turned out to be my worst semester of teaching. Whether due to the use of AI or unchecked device usage during class, students were completely disengaged, making meaningful discussions nearly impossible. I worried that this was going to be the new reality of teaching. Utterly burnt out and on a friend’s recommendation, I sought advice from a colleague who had found an innovative way to use blue books. My previous experience with blue books had been negative—they were simply the medium for college exams. A recent Wall Street Journal article bearing the title “They Were Every Student’s Worst Nightmare. Now Blue Books Are Back” showed that I wasn’t alone in making this association. Unsurprisingly, too, the article revealed how blue books have become the latest "stick" of education—an old-school method to prevent new forms of cheating.

But Claire had repurposed them. She was using blue books in more creative ways, an inheritance from her long experience taking theater classes. Her “Drama for Teaching and Learning” courses had used blue books as a form of journal that was easy to acquire, collect, and transport while still offering a semester-wide snapshot of the class events. Reflection, especially after trying new lessons or experimenting with activities was an essential component of the course which Claire found to translate beyond the theater classroom and into general education. I adopted her approach and was so happy with the results that I asked her to collaborate with me on sharing these ideas with readers of The Important Work.

Claire used blue books as a form of in-class journaling, reflection, and process-based practice writing. At the start of the semester, she distributed fresh blue books to her classes with an introductory prompt based on the learning outcomes of the class as a way to create a baseline for students’ writing, both to get to know the students as well as to learn more about their handwriting, thought process, and timed writing ability. Claire would then collect the books at the end of class. As the semester progressed, she would slowly increase the amount of writing. The prompts ranged from reading-based responses to creative musings to self-reflections. Scaffolding assignments, like annotated bibliographies, practice theses, short “they say/I say” essays, six sentence arguments, outlines, and free writing were conducted in class using blue books alongside creative poems, music video storyboarding, short story writing, and post-unit reflections based on the Taxonomy of Reflection. She then asked students to engage in the think-pair-share model where they would discuss their blue book answers with a partner, then either share out to the whole class or build upon incrementally larger sharing groups until the whole class had rejoined to discuss their ideas.

By Polinagodz - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40190247

I used the blue books in similar, but more delimited, ways. My main goal was to invite students to connect course texts to their own experience. For instance, in a discussion of Max Weber’s concept of bureaucracy, I asked students to reflect on metrics, and what they obscured about themselves—for instance, their personalities, their experiences, or certain forms of expertise. Another prompt asked students to revisit a poem or a passage from an assigned text and rewrite it to reflect their own lived experience. For instance, in the first paragraph of Sayaka Murata’s book Convenience Store Woman, Murata captures the sights and sounds of a convenience store from the perspective of the protagonist. I asked students to rewrite the paragraph using language that would capture the feeling of a space that they inhabited. I used some prompts to help students to experience the curiosity that motivates research for many scholars. For a final project asking students to research the production and labor conditions of some product that they used often, I asked students early in the semester to hypothesize how they thought the product was made, and midway through I asked them to revisit those first guesses after some initial investigating.

In Claire’s class, students received a check mark for complete writings that demonstrated an understanding of course content, a dot for partial answers, or feedback for responses that failed to demonstrate the daily readings or the prompt. As students were encouraged to see the blue books as a creative outlet to demonstrate their mastery of course readings, ideas, and practice writing in a loosely structured format, spelling and grammar were unimportant. This step away from specific writing conventions was intended to encourage students to focus on thoughts and to trust their own ideas and creativity. In some cases, students requested to keep their blue books after the end of the semester as a record of their work or to continue building on ideas they came up with that they wished to continue working on after the end of the course.

Since this was my first time using them, blue books served mainly as a measure of participation—and one that many students appreciated. In response to a final prompt asking how the course would have been different without blue books, one student wrote that if I had asked them to answer aloud, their responses would have been different because it was harder “to be vulnerable in front of so many people while speaking” in contrast to writing, “where only one person will see it.” Another student echoed this thought when they wrote that when raising their hand in class, they got anxious “and didn’t elaborate much,” while the blue book let them “keep adding as [they] went on.” Another student noted that the blue book helped deepen their understanding and interest in course ideas. In short, the blue books seemed to create a space where students felt comfortable developing their own thoughts.

Many instructors assign reflective exercises intermittently in class. My approach this semester differed in that I assigned them consistently in each class period, and students had all of their responses together in one place, allowing them to revisit older responses and find patterns in their interests and concerns. For this reason, the blue book format is less important than the consistent practice it provides and the record it creates for students of their intellectual, creative development. Instructors may want to invite students to supply their own notebook – or even make their own. I would make a case for making time for this writing in class (rather than assigning it as homework), and for preserving it as a handwritten material object. There is an intimacy in handwriting, which also serves as a powerful reminder of the embodied nature of writing – as distinct from “automated text production,” as John Warner describes it in his recent book More than Words.

Next semester, I’m also planning, at the end of the semester, to ask students – after they’ve written their own response—to use AI to answer the final question of ‘how would this course have been different without blue books?” I’ll ask them to evaluate the AI answer and then ask if they think I should let students in my course use AI to answer all the prompts. Based on their comments this semester, I believe that many students will not want to outsource self-discovery.

This, to us, is a key contribution that blue books can make in their various uses. As Warner noted in a recent post “What Matters?”, our challenge “is to convince students that there is a genuine benefit in the struggle of learning as something distinct from the steady forced march of schooling.” He then asks: “how do I convey the genuine value of thinking when cultural messaging of the moment is the opposite?”

We think that blue books offer one answer to that question. By engaging with questions that encourage personal connections to course material in a low-stakes grading context, students have the opportunity to experience the joy of intellectual play—experimenting with language and exploring their ideas freely. Indeed, Warner suggests on p.101 of More Than Words that ChatGPT has gained traction as an alternative because “most people have not been given the chance to explore and play within the world of writing.”

This idea is also explored in Jenny Lederer and Jennifer Trainor’s recent post on The Important Work, “Even OpenAI suggests bringing back blue books”, and we agree with their conclusion that blue books can offer a way “to rebuild learning communities, emphasize the importance of writing to learning and thinking” and “centers process over product.” The beauty of blue books is not that it offers a form of surveillance but that it creates a space for contemplation, creativity, and contemplation. Ultimately, this process of play, rooted in thoughtful reflection, becomes a pathway to self-discovery—an experience fundamentally different from the mechanical output of ChatGPT.

Especially during the early years of college, the opportunity to engage in this kind of self-discovery can serve as a powerful motivator, transforming the struggle of learning into rewarding exploration.

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